Governing the Corpopolis: Modern Firms as Political Communities

Firms—business enterprises in all their various forms—occupy an increasingly contested position in contemporary society. Some argue that their proper role is strictly limited to the impersonal provision of goods and services. Others argue that their wealth, power, and position require much more from them vis-à-vis their communities, the environment, and, most relevantly here, their employees. Very little of the debate over the proper behavior of firms has drawn on the collective action literature despite the fact that firms exist and function exclusively as the result of collective action. In this paper, as elsewhere, I show that attending to the collective nature of the firm can help us resolve some of the debated issues. I begin (Sect. 1) by presenting a holist, structuralist account of corporate agents: highly structured collectives that qualify as moral agents in their own right. Almost any functional firm with multiple employees will qualify as a corporate agent and thus, I have argued elsewhere, will be bound by traditional moral obligations. Unlike other accounts, this particular account emphasizes the social aspects of corporate agents and thus of firms. Looking at firms through this lens highlights their nature as communities of people joined together for the purpose of improving their own lives. In short, this account shows that firms are a lot like the Aristotelian polis. In Sect. 2, I draw on Aristotle and recent work in political science to fill a gap in the literature by offering a novel account of a “political community.” In Sect. 3, I show that collectives that qualify as corporate agents will generally qualify as political communities as well. In Sect. 4, I argue that political communities should be governed in accordance with political theory rather than moral theory, i.e., that the governing bodies should draw on normative standards from political theories (liberalism, libertarianism, etc.) rather than from individualistic moral theories (Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, etc.). Section 5 briefly explores the implications for firm governance, most of which are sharply at odds with contemporary practice, but I close with a warning for those who assume that the political nature of the firm wins them a liberal, democratic workplace.