When innovation calls for reforming the firm: Walther Rathenau in a historical light

摘要

The work of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922), the head of Allgemeine Elektricitaets-Gesellschaft (AEG) and a minister at the start of the Weimar Republic, sheds a historical lighton the ideas that intellectuals and corporate executives in the 1910s had about the modem firm and its social responsibilities. For Rathenau, the modern firm stands out owing not to its size but to its capacity for collective innovation. Seeing this capacity as the grounds for the firm's new responsibilities, he proposed institutionalizing a specific governance for articulating the firm's private status with its finalities of collective interest. Now that corporate social responsibility is being debated from the angles of a voluntary ethics and utilitarian approach, reading Rathenau shows us that the history of corporate social responsibility could have struck out in a different direction. Original perspectives open for the future…