Art Kleiner offered,
> They [corporations] descended from monasteries, but the corporate form
>evolved as a means for people to act on a large scale, without being part
>of either government or the church.
And John Constantine replied
I simply don't believe that this is the case. without the premise that
corporations and the corporate form only exist in the west, nor do I
believe that they (corporations) evolved to avoid being part of government
or the church. Each of these is a separate discussion worth pursuing. The
latter issue is what I'm concerned with at the moment.
There are two "angles" on the corporate form (at least two). One is that
it is essentially a military model, requiring differentiation of functions
and levels of leadership, command and control. This is the present
"inanimate" form of the business corporation today. The military model
itself however has been around for millenia. It seems to have survived
simply because it appears to work.
The second is that of "shared risk", pursued by individuals who gave up
their personal rights for the goal of profit/loss with least cost to
themselves personally. Having given up to the inanimate form their rights,
they were not any longer able to dictate the future of the form.
Multinational corporations are the most recent extensions of this form,
not bound by government controls, and with the ability to shift resources
and risks from country to country, region to region, hemisphere to
hemisphere."
John - you are right, but Art isn't wrong. The modern joint stock
corporation has its origins in the mercantilist companies of European
colonial expansion - The East India Company, etc. These companies were
formed for the reasons that Art stated, and grew through shareholding as
you describe. They adopted military managerial forms because that was the
only model available, but from the renaissance on military systems
themselves owed much to the command and control structures of the medieval
church (when feudalism still ruled, military command structures were
grounded in the feudal relations and vassalage. There was no overall
control. Inidividual units owed allegiance to their feudal commander, not
the army commander. They could, and often did, simply leave and go home in
the middle of campaigns or battles).
Modern military systems can probably trace their most direct ancestry to
Cromwell's New Model Army (any military historians around??).
Until quite recently - and still in some places - military experience was
seen as the most valued prerequisite for management. In fact military
history gives us endless metaphors for modern organisational learning -
William Wallace and Edward the First, the South African War and Vietnam,
all illustrate the benefits of organisational fluidity against
corporate/mercantilist gigantism. There are many military particpants in
this list who illustrate that the modern military is attempting to come to
terms with the implications of those lessons.
Phillip Capper
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business
PO Box 2855
Wellington
New Zealand
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>