The Corporation as a Community, Not as a Corpus

摘要

The concept of a corporation has evolved from a purposeless mechanism created by its god (the owner) to do his work, to a purposeful, animate system (an organism) with a head and distributed owners but with parts whose purposes are irrelevant to both, to a social system that is obliged to serve the purposes of its parts and its containing systems and their parts. As a social system, the corporation has begun to be viewed as a community, an organization with no owners but which exists primarily to serve the needs of its stakeholders, particularly its members. Charles Handy has argued convincingly that corporations should be viewed as communities, not as organisms (1999). I have reached the same conclusion by a different route, and I present it here along with some consequences to management and organizations.