Mathias Hein Jessen
Mathias Hein Jessen is an intellectual historian working on the relation between the state and the corporation in the history of political, economic and legal thought. He is the principal investigator of Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. He holds a BSc in Business Administration and Philosophy from CBS and an MA and a PhD from The History of Ideas at Aarhus University.
In addition to the theoretical and methodological basis of the project as a whole, Mathias will be working on how corporations were and are delineated from the state by likening them to individual human beings. He will also focus on ideas of legal personality and corporate personhood in English and German historical-legal thought and in Anglo-American corporate theory and corporate law.
Mathias has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Management & Organizational History, VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations and Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought. He is also the author of a number of other journal articles, book chapters, book reviews and online publications, and has edited a number of books and journal special issues.
Tessa Barnow
Tessa Barnow is a PhD fellow working on the EU’s governance of the sustainable transition of the economy and society using the EU Taxonomy as the vehicle for making private corporations sustainable. I study how private corporations are made subjects by the EU’s governing regime on green growth, and how corporations as autonomous subjects react to and identify with the EU’s ideal of the profitable, growing and sustainable corporation. Further, I am interested in examining the EU Taxonomy’s government of the sustainable corporation from the perspectives of degrowth and corporate imperialism, and discuss this new form of corporate governance in the light of previous scholarly critique of green growth and responsible corporate behavior.
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen is a political theorist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Visions of Council Democracy: Castoriadis, Lefort, Arendt (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Benjamin’s research is concerned with historical, conceptual and political relation between democracy and capitalism, and has appeared in journals such as Political Theory, Constellations, Polity, Thesis Eleven, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Management and Organizational History.
In the Corporate Subjects: An Intellectual History of the Corporation project, Benjamin is responsible for a work package concerning the theory of the firm in 20th century American corporate theory, economics and management thinking. The central aim of this research is to analyze the political and philosophical underpinnings of the neo-liberal, Chicago School conception of the corporation as a nexus of voluntary contracts between free and equal individuals as well as to explore how this conception of the corporation delegitimized other, more market-critical positions.