List of participants

Joshua Barkan, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Georgia

Tessa Barnow, PhD Fellow Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School

David Ciepley, Associate Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia

Paddy Ireland, Professor of Law, University of Bristol Law School

Mathias Hein Jessen, Associate Professor Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School

Dr Samuel Mansell, Lecturer in Business Ethics, University of St Andrews Business School

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, Assistant Professor, Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School

Jean-Philippe Robé, Attorney at law, member of the Paris and New York bars, teaching at the Sciences Po Law School

Philip J. Stern, Associate Professor, Department of History, Duke University

Jeroen Veldman, Professor of Corporate Governance, Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Chairman, Nyenrode Corporate Governance Institute

Hugh Willmott, Professor of Management, Bayes Business School, City University London, Cardiff Business School

Thursday 7 December 

09-09:30: Welcome and registration 

09:30-10: Welcome and introduction 

10-11:30: Session 1

Chair: Mathias Hein Jessen 

Jeroen Veldman: The corporation as a synthetic subject: corporate social ontology and the reduction of the legal and economic status of natural persons 

Commentator: Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen 

David Ciepley: Governing People or Governing Property? How Dartmouth College Assimilated the Corporation to Liberalism by Treating it as a Trust  

Commentator: Samuel Mansell 

11:30-12:30: lunch 

12:30-14: session 2

Chair: Joshua Barkan 

Tessa Barnow: The EU Taxonomy’s sustainable corporate subject: The politics in financialising sustainability in order to finance the sustainable transition 

Commentator: Jeroen Veldman 

Hugh Willmott: Is Corporate Governance ‘fit for purpose’? Considering the case of Equinor and the Rosebank oil and gas field 

Commentator: Philip J. Stern 

14:30-16: session 3 (2 papers)  

Chair: David Ciepley 

Samuel Mansell: How should philosophers in business ethics approach the history of ideas? 

Commentator: Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen 

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen: Contractual Freedom and Individual Voluntarism: The Nexus of Contracts Firm as Political Ideology 

Commentator: Joshua Barkan 

20: Dinner in town 

Nr.30 RESTAURANT

Nansensgade 30, st. th.
 

Friday 8 December 

09-10:30: session 4

Chair: Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen 

Joshua Barkan: Climate Leviathan’s Two Bodies: Corporate Concessions in the Energy Transition 

Commentator: Mathias Hein Jessen 

Philip J. Stern: The Corporation’s Three Bodies: Person, Society, Colony 

Commentator: Hugh Willmott 

11-12:30: session 5

Chair: Philip J. Stern

Paddy Ireland: The Corporation as a Separate Legal Entity and an Object of Property 

Commentator: Jean-Philippe Robé 

Jean-Philippe Robé: Incarnations of the Power System: Christendom – State System – Global Power System 

Commentator: David Ciepley 

12:30-13:30: lunch 

13:30-15: session 6

Chair: Tessa Barnow 

Mathias Hein Jessen: Corporate Subjects: Separating state and corporation through individualization 

Commentator: Paddy Ireland 

Round-up, publication and future collaboration

15- Goodbye and thank you

○ 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.