The research project Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation, based at Copenhagen Business School, hosts a workshop in December 2023 exploring intellectual histories of the corporation. The workshop is aimed at working towards the publication of an edited volume or special issue with a leading publisher.

In public discourse as well as academic debate, we are constantly confronted with the political and economic power and influence of corporations. Corporations account for a dominant percentage of the world’s largest economies, not to mention global CO2 emissions, just as corporations are influential in political campaigns, elections, data-extraction, surveillance, and are increasingly taking over tasks which we have come to associate with the sovereign state such as prisons, war, security, health, social services, space travel, etc. Corporations are routinely involved in scandals and crises, from the role of banks, credit rating agencies and financial institutions in the Financial Crisis of 2007-8 to the numerous whitewashing, tax evasion and tax fraud schemes uncovered in recent years which have significant consequences for national revenues and rising inequality. Corporations are at the same time seen as crucial to the functioning of the world economy, witnessed by the swift handing out of bailout- and aid-packages in the wake of the Financial Crisis, and most recently in the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, it could seem that corporate lives matter more than those of natural human beings. Moreover, corporations are not only seen as the main agents of economic growth, but also of social development through the doctrines of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Citizenship, The UN Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance)-investments, as well as the EU Green Deal and EU Taxonomy for environmentally sustainable activities.

Especially in the US, debate over corporations and their political status is abundant with corporations having been granted the constitutional rights of free speech and religious liberties in US Supreme Court Rulings in 2010 and 2014. Recently, US Republicans have become very critical of ESG-investments, terming it ‘woke capitalism’ exactly because of the introduction of political aims in economic and corporate governance, which they believe should serve purely ‘economic’ interests.

Corporations thus occupy a paradoxical role in our current social and political order as both the (perceived) agents of growth, development and prosperity, as well as of inequality, poverty, whitewashing, tax evasion, climate crisis and environmental disasters. Recent developments have thus increasingly problematised the conception of the corporation as primarily an economic entity.

At the same time, critical scholarship on the corporation has sprouted in a number of disciplines where it has not earlier been a central focal point or a specific point of interest (of which the following is merely a selection): In history (Stern 2011; 2023), corporate law and legal history (Ireland 1996; 2010; Baars 2019), management and organization studies (Veldman 2013; Veldman and Willmott 2013); Geography (Barkan 2013), political theory (Ciepley 2013; Ferreras 2017; Singer 2019), and in two handbooks on the corporation published by Cambridge and Oxford University Press respectively (Baars and Spicer 2017; O’Brien, O’Kelley, and Clarke 2019). There is, in other words, an increasing interest in the corporation from disciplines other than economics and traditional corporate law, to which it has traditionally belonged.

A common trait in this literature is the ambition to understand the corporation not as an economic, but primarily as an historical, political and governmental entity. This workshop aims to contribute to this literature from the perspective of intellectual history in order to analyse and understand how the corporation is and has been understood, thought, legitimized and how the contestations over its nature, meaning and role has been the subject of struggle, fight and (re-)definitions.

“Intellectual history” is here understood broadly as the study of the history and actuality of human thought, of ideas and intellectual patterns and developments over time and of intellectuals (understood as people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, concern themselves with, and fight and struggle over ideas) (Gordon 2012). Intellectual history as understood here is concerned with thought not only as a way to understand and grasp the world, but as a way to act in it, focusing on ideas, concepts and thought both understood as thought and intellectual practice in itself, but also very centrally as a practice that is hindered, rationalised, made possible, structured, limited, (de-)legimitized and made legible by thought (Thorup 2012). It is important to stress that intellectual history in this sense is not only interested in uncovering the past, but also the present.

The workshop is interested in bringing together a wide variety of contributions on the intellectual history of the corporation, meaning the intellectual history of ‘corporation’ itself has been thought, conceptualized, (attempted) legitimized, and the meaning of the concept or idea has changed over time and has been, and is presently, used for a number of different political projects.

○ The sources and legitimacy of corporate power historically and presently; that is, how corporate law, corporate governance and corporate and economic theory constitute the corporation as a legitimate, economic, and non-political actor located predominantly in the economic sphere. Or how has and is the corporation problematized or conceived in alternative economic and legal theories?

○ Corporate theory and the construction of corporate subjectivity. How is the corporation, both historically and presently, constructed and constituted as a subject, person or individual? Which conceptual models of subjectivity, individuality, identity or gender has been or can be used to conceptualize the corporation?

○ The responsible and accountable corporate subject. How is the corporation conceived and constructed as a responsible subject, for instance with regards to the green transition or social and development goals, and how is the corporation conceived as a subject, (un)accountable to its actions and (in)capable of enabling change?

○ The intellectual history of the corporation. How has the corporation been conceived and legitimized in the history of political, economic, and legal thought? How can the corporation be studied and conceived from the perspective of intellectual history, conceptual history, the genealogy of governmentality, global intellectual history, or other approaches to intellectual history?

○ The corporation and the state. How has and is the corporation conceptualized in relation to, or distinction from, the state? As a market, a collection or association of individuals, purposeful organization, a political community, democracy, autocracy, dictatorship, etc.? What is the role of the corporation in relation to the state, how is its role in society envisaged, what is the societal, political, local, communal or democratic role of the corporation? Are corporations envisaged as societal or democratic participants or adversaries?

○ Subject, individual, person, body. Corporations are very centrally legal persons, and have throughout history been conceptualized via analogies with ‘natural’ human beings as bodies, persons, individuals, subjects with life property, rights, responsibility, citizenship, duty, liability, accountability, etc. Which different conceptual models have been used to give life to the ‘artificial’ entities of corporations and which consequences do they have?

○ Perspectives from outside the Anglo-American sphere. The current critical literature on the corporation is predominantly, if not almost exclusively, focused on the Anglo-American sphere. The workshop will give special priority to papers that focus on areas outside this sphere.

○ The workshop will take place on 7-8 December 2023 at Copenhagen Business School. Participants will present pre-circulated papers, and the ambition is to work towards the publication of an edited volume in 2025. Participants will also be invited to a follow up workshop in 2024. Participation in the workshop does not guarantee participation in the publication.

○ Participants’ costs related to travel and accommodation can be covered by the research project.

○  For inquiries, questions or submission of abstracts, please contact Mathias Hein Jessen (mhj.bhl@cbs.dk) or Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen (bap.bhl@cbs.dk). The workshop will be based on the presentation of shorter draft papers.

○ Deadline for abstracts (300-500 words): 1 September 2023.

○ Deadline for draft papers (3000-5000 words): 23 November (to be circulated among the participants).

○ The workshop is organized by the research-project Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation located at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School and funded by The Carlsberg-Foundation.