Taming the Cheshire Cat: on the governance of (transnational) corporations

Maha Rafi Atal and Jeroen Veldman

Chapter 31 in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy, 2025, pp 534-544 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The past two decades have seen new scholarly interest in the power of corporations. Most of this research departs from the assumption that the political power of the corporation is derived from its economic power. We argue that this approach provides limited insight into the governance problem. A more promising approach treats the governance problem in relation to the history and social ontology of the modern corporate form. In particular, the concurrent emergence of conflicting social ontologies of the corporation in law has enabled corporations to shift between definitions and evade scrutiny. This chapter examines the historical development of the modern corporate form in relation to debates on the nature of sovereignty to explain how the modern corporation projects its own sovereignty in society, and evades the external imposition of sovereignty by the state. We propose conceptual and policy changes that would better enable states to regulate modern corporations.

Keywords: Private governance; Corporate power; Corporate groups; Corporate governance; Social ontology; Transnational corporations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803921181
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803921198.00043 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21466_31

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().