The Corporation was quite an interesting documentary. To be honest, I don’t know much about businesses and company law at the moment and I feel ambiguous on whether or not I am convinced that corporations are inevitably going to behave badly or be psychopathic (perhaps due to my lack of knowledge in the area!). On the one hand, I acknowledge that corporations are designed to value monetary profit above all. But, I am not sure if this necessarily means that corporations will inevitably behave badly (I might be too idealistic in my thoughts).
As the documentary noted, corporations have to engage in perception management and public relations. I think that, because corporations have to maintain public confidence and a positive image of their brand in order to be able to have sales and make profit, they would have to do at least some things to show social responsibility and environmental sustainability if the public knows about the consequences of the corporation’s activities. I think this would have to be beyond lip-service to social responsibility and though the corporations would still continue causing harm to gain profit, they would also have to do a little bit of good for public relations – especially if there are whistleblowers and organizations out there to keep the public aware of what is going on. I also think that the people operating a corporation can try to set some positive goals for the corporation, such that it may be profit-driven but also have goals of achieving sustainability (like the example of the CEO of Interface in the documentary).
I understand that shareholders would just care about monetary value and profit, but I think that having a positive image and meeting goals towards sustainability are linked to profit if the consumer base shows that it will choose to buy products and services from socially responsible corporations. I’m leaning towards thinking that the corporation is not inherently psychopathic, but that its structure leads to bad consequences and that corporations can behave in a good manner if their vision is altered or the consumer base demands it. If they are held accountable for their actions and there is awareness of their actions, they will need to show that they are doing some good or at least not behaving badly to maintain profit since that profit often depends on the consumers’ choices and opinions. But, I’m not sure how this could be done within the current way corporations are structured or whether this is too idealistic. I think the key for this would be to have public awareness about the actions of corporations, and then the corporations would have to actually cease behaving badly, behave not as badly, or do some good to manage the public perception.
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