Corporations and Persons is not for the casual reader: the first half comprises a dense and highly contentious examination of the nature of personhood and moral responsibility and the second half includes a torrent of assertions relating to alleged duties of corporations which requires slow and careful consideration.
That said, the book deals with important issues. David Silver argues that ‘the corporation is … a kind of person in moral relationship with human beings, and in particular with democratic society’ (page 1). He thus considers that corporations have moral responsibilities and, ‘in a certain abstract sense’ (page 5), moral rights and he seeks to describe these responsibilities and rights. Unsurprisingly, he considers the acceptance of his thesis to be important, stating ‘I have written this book to urge all of us to adopt an understanding of the relationship between corporations and the rest of democratic society which is grounded in a commitment to liberal democratic values’ (page 186).
Silver rejects ‘the idea that we have theoretical intuitions which directly provide us with knowledge of the nature of moral responsibility’ (page 12) but his view of such responsibility is nonetheless ultimately subjective. He refers to our ‘reactive attitudes’, which he describes as ‘a family of mental states which includes blame, resentment, gratitude, indignation, and appreciation’ (page 11) and he goes on to assert that ‘we should understand our theoretical intuitions about moral responsibility as arising out of our efforts to make sense of our reactive attitudes, and then judge their validity insofar as they accurately make sense of them’ (page 12). It is thus ultimately on the basis of our ‘reactive attitudes’ that he concludes that corporations have moral responsibilities.
He recognises that he is dealing with ‘age-old questions’ of philosophy (page 9) and he seeks to deal with a number of modern objections to his theories. However, although some of what he says is powerful, it does not dislodge the most serious objections. In particular, Christians and other monotheists must surely start with a concept of morality that relates to God: to say that someone has a moral duty is to say that they are accountable to God in respect of their behaviour. The implication of this is that only sentient beings can have moral responsibilities and, since corporations are not sentient (a fact that Silver accepts [page 4]), they cannot have such responsibilities. In this connection, it is interesting that Silver himself slips into using language about corporations that implies sentience (e.g. ‘corporations can have a messy set of dispositions towards their moral obligations’ [page 20]).
Quite apart from theistic arguments, contrary to Silver’s view, David Shoemaker is surely right to assert that corporations (in contrast to their directors and managers) ‘cannot be sensible targets of angry blame’ (page 17). To say that a corporation ought to have done something is no more than a shorthand way of saying that those running the corporation ought to have ensured that the relevant thing was done. Anger is only meaningfully directed at them. Anyone who doubts this should imagine a situation in which a corporation has no directors or managers and ask whether they could meaningfully be angry with it.
Silver accepts the existence of objective value and thus objective morality and he centres the latter in ‘the intrinsic value of human beings qua sentient person’ (page 45). Such a starting point may well lead to conclusions similar to those that Christians draw from the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. However, on its own, it leads to an entirely human centred morality which is rather narrower than a morality that starts with God’s creation and care of all things and the notion of responsibility to God. Furthermore, Silver goes on to state that his theory ‘analyzes the world in terms of how to create the greatest level of rational self-governance that can be made available to each person in society’ (page 46; emphasis Silver’s), which elevates self-governance from being a relevant consideration to a central position that is potentially dangerous and is certainly contrary to a monotheistic view of the world.
On the basis of his theories of personhood and morality, Silver seeks to establish the purpose of corporations, which he believe is ‘to create products and services that provide a benefit to those who ultimately use them’ (page 63). He then moves on to describe a large number of duties that he believes corporations owe (25 of varying levels of specificity are listed on page 174) and a lesser number of rights that he believes they enjoy. His view of purpose is contentious but not new and there are books that argue for similar purposes in more detail (e.g. the books by Colin Mayer reviewed on this website). Likewise, there is little new in the duties and rights that he advocates, although this is not to say that they are either uncontentious or even clear. Indeed, many of the alleged duties, as listed on page 174, are not adequately backed up by argument and many of them are vague (e.g. the assertions that corporations should not seek more than their ‘fair share of attention from policy makers’ [page 155]).
Much more seriously, there appears to be a fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, Silver’s reaction to the divergence between his views and the laws of the USA and, on the other hand, his stated commitment to the upholding of democracy. This conflict is most evident in relation to corporate purpose. Silver’s view is, of course, out of line with the law of the State of Delaware (where a large proportion of major US corporations are incorporated), which requires that corporations focus, at least primarily, on the pursuit of profit. At one point, Silver appears to accept that Delaware law inevitably trumps his view: he says that ‘It is up to each democratic society to make its own determination regarding the purpose of the firm’ (page 53). Indeed, he goes further, saying that ‘democratic citizens have the prerogative to institute a system of democratic social governance, which assigns moral and legal rights and duties to individuals and institutions’ (page 54; emphasis Silver’s), which is a truly extraordinary statement in so far as it asserts that morality is determined by the state! However, at the same time, Silver argues for civil disobedience by the managers of Delaware corporations (i.e. non-compliance with the Delaware law relating to corporate purpose [pages 96-99]). How does he reconcile these statements?
The answer is: by characterising the relevant Delaware law as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘undemocratic’. He says that ‘I call a social decision-making process authoritarian if it does not track the values and judgments of the people it affects’ (page 91) and, having stated that ‘interstate competition for corporations is an authoritarian force’, he concludes that ‘to the extent that Delaware’s corporate code posits a legal duty to maximise profits, this lacks democratic legitimacy’ (page 93). This in turn leads to the conclusion that ‘non-compliance [by managers with that legal duty] can be justified given that the law’s understanding of their duties was generated in an authoritarian manner’ (page 98).
This is breathtaking! He simply redefines the word authoritarian so as to include, and the word democratic so as to exclude, things that he does not like. Delaware’s laws may be undesirable, even unethical, but they are constitutional, established through the democratic process and not authoritarian, using these words in their normal senses. Furthermore, leaving aside the linguistic sleight of hand, if a democratic society is to survive, the bar for civil disobedience must be set far higher than Silver suggests.
Silver uses the same technique to attack court decisions that he does not like, including both cases upholding and interpreting the Delaware laws that he dislikes and the much debated Citizens United case, in which the US Supreme Court overturned laws restricting political spending by corporations. He describes the latter as ‘highly antidemocratic’ (page 115) and, at one level, he has a point in relation to this: the role of the US Supreme Court has the effect of transferring power from the legislatures of the USA to the courts. However, while this may or may not be desirable, it is the consequence of the US constitution, which is itself a democratically adopted and amendable instrument. Furthermore, the nature of a Supreme Court decision (i.e. whether or not it is antidemocractic) cannot possibly turn on whether or not it determines that a particular matter is or is not in breach of that constitution.
The strangest thing about Silver’s book is the fact that he could have argued in favour of the duties (and indeed rights) that he discusses in the second half of the book without the need to argue that corporations are morally responsible persons. For example, he could have argued in favour of his view of the purpose of corporations by arguing that their managers have a duty to pursue this purpose. Indeed, as the book progresses, Silver talks more and more about managers and, even human beings in general. In particular, he recognises that the question of civil disobedience is, in reality, a question of the conflict between what he sees as the moral duties of the managers of corporations and their legal duties. He also acknowledges that many of the duties he asserts are duties applicable to all people and his comments about democratic legitimacy are clearly independent of the philosophical issues that he has considered earlier in the book.
This contributes to the impression that Silver may have an agenda that goes beyond that which is the book’s stated purpose or at least a desire to appeal to a particular audience: at several points, there are passing references to stock issues that suggest virtue signalling (e.g. there is a short paragraph on page 49 that crams references to ‘racial and ethnic minorities’,’ indigenous peoples’ and ‘people with nontraditional genders and sexual orientations’ into a few lines); his comments on the Citizens United case include the statement that the decision ‘reflected … close personal connections between the national political and industrial elites, and perhaps a new understanding of their shared class interests’ (page 115); he asserts (without argument) a duty ‘to develop an historical awareness of … the ways that the history of capitalism is intertwined with the history of colonialism, racial oppression, and slavery’ (page 167); and the main part of the book ends with criticism of the repeal of the provisions of the US Glass-Steagall legislation that, in essence, required the separation of commercial and investment banking, an attack on the suggestion that misguided government policy relating to lending to minorities was a cause of the Global Financial Crisis, an attack on the ‘unfair’ response of the US Government to the crisis, and statements relating to the duties of corporations in respect of climate change – all in the space of just over two pages (pages 176-178)!
The book raises important issues but it is deeply flawed. The examination of the philosophical issues in its first few chapters is worthy of study, albeit with considerable care. However, those wishing to consider in detail the duties of corporations and their managers would be better off looking elsewhere.
‘Corporations and Persons: A Theory of the Firm in Democratic Society’ by David Silver was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press (978-0-198-94068-5). 189pp.
Richard Godden is a Lawyer and a Consultant of Linklaters. He was a Partner of Linklaters for 36 years during which time he advised on a wide range of transactions and issues in various parts of the world.
Richard’s experience includes his time as Secretary of the UK Takeover Panel and later as a member of its rule making committee. He also served as Global Head of Client Sectors, responsible for Linklaters’ industry sector groups, and was a member of its Global Executive Committee.
He has been the chair of the CEME board since 2023.
The timing could hardly be better. Elisabeth Braw’s Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World was published just as Donald Trump returned to the White House, and it has lost little of its pertinence in the year since then. And yet Braw, an Atlantic Council fellow delivers a deeper message. Trump isn’t the cause of deglobalization. He’s merely the symptom of a much deeper malaise that the Western establishment spent three decades pretending didn’t exist.
The book’s central thesis is brutally simple. The globalization project that dominated from the fall of the Berlin Wall until roughly the mid-2010s is already dead. Braw traces the story chronologically, from the giddy optimism of the 1990s through to today’s fractured world order. Back then, we were assured that opening up trade with China would inevitably lead to political liberalization. Beijing would discover the joys of democracy once its middle class got rich enough. Meanwhile, integrating Russia into the global economy would prevent any return to Cold War tensions. Financial deregulation would spread prosperity. Supply chains spanning multiple continents would deliver ever-cheaper goods to grateful consumers.
It all sounded fantastic in the economics faculties and corporate boardrooms. Out in the real world, however, it did not work out quite so well. Manufacturing workers in the West watched as their jobs vanished to China. Entire communities were hollowed out. The promised retraining programmes turned out to be worthless. The nineties offered plentiful opportunities, but there were plenty of people who were left behind.
What makes Braw’s account particularly valuable is her willingness to name names and tell human stories. This isn’t some dry academic treatise. She’s spoken to executives, policymakers, and ordinary workers across the globe. The result is a book that comes vividly to life with the full cast of characters who shaped this era.
The financial crisis of 2008 should have been the wake-up call that something was not working. Instead, the elites doubled down. Yes, there were problems with financial integration, but surely the answer was more regulation, not less interconnection? Then came Brexit. Then Trump’s first presidency. Then Covid, which revealed just how dangerously dependent Western nations had become on Chinese manufacturing for everything from pharmaceuticals to personal protective equipment. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with tacit Chinese support, delivered the final blow. Suddenly, all those smart people who’d been lecturing us about the virtues of economic interdependence had to confront an awkward reality: authoritarian regimes don’t share our values and will happily weaponize trade relationships when it suits them. Who could have guessed?
Braw documents how China has used its dominance of supply chains and critical materials to pursue strategic advantages. An increasingly authoritarian China’s control over products and materials needed for the energy transition has created dependencies that Western governments are only now scrambling to address. But it’s rather late in the day to suddenly discover that outsourcing your entire industrial base to a geopolitical rival might have downsides.
The book excels at explaining why plenty of leaders have concluded that globalization simply isn’t working anymore. Supply chains are vulnerable. National security has been compromised. Domestic social cohesion has frayed as entire regions were sacrificed on the altar of cheaper consumer goods and fatter corporate margins. So what comes next? For Braw, the answer is ‘friendshoring’. The idea is straightforward: trade should continue, but primarily with countries that share Western values of human rights, free markets, and the rule of law. Build supply chains through allied nations. Accept that this will mean higher costs, but gain security and resilience in return.
It’s a sensible enough prescription, though one can’t help wondering if it’s practical. Most countries quite sensibly want to trade with everyone. Consumers choose the best value products, which is precisely why Chinese electric vehicles are proving so popular despite Western politicians’ huffing and puffing. Raising tariffs to force friendshoring will increase costs for ordinary people and risk making Western industries permanently uncompetitive. Likewise, the Trump administration seems keener on battling with Europe than China. There is not much sign of ‘shared values’ in its tariff schedules.
Still, Braw deserves credit for facing up to uncomfortable truths. The West was naive and arrogant in assuming liberal democracy would inevitably spread alongside McDonald’s franchises. The assumption that economic integration would automatically produce political convergence was always wishful thinking dressed up as sophisticated analysis. The book won a gold medal at the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards, and it’s easy to see why. This is sharp, well-researched work that cuts through decades of conventional wisdom to explain how we arrived at this fractured moment. Braw writes with authority but also wit, making complex geopolitical developments accessible without dumbing them down. As Trump imposes sweeping tariffs and the EU erects barriers against Chinese imports, we need clear-eyed analysis of what deglobalisation actually means for economies, businesses, and ordinary people. Braw provides exactly that.
Her conclusion is bracing: the world is dividing once again into competing blocs, but international cooperation remains possible if we’re more realistic about who we’re dealing with. The era of naive globalization is finished. What replaces it depends on whether Western nations can rebuild industrial capacity, strengthen alliances, and accept that cheap stuff from authoritarian regimes comes with a price tag that goes far beyond the sticker on the shelf. It’s going to be expensive, difficult, and politically fraught. But then, perhaps we should have thought of that before we outsourced our future to Beijing.
‘Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World’ by Elisabeth Braw was published in 2025 by Yale University Press (ISBN: 978-0-300-28263-4). 352pp.)
Matthew Lynn is an author, journalist and entrepreneur. He writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and Money Week, is the author of the Death Force thrillers, and is the founder of Lume Books.
In Work as a Calling, Garret Potts (Professor in the Department of Religious Studies for Business & Healthcare Professionals at The University of South Florida) asks: ‘could it be the case that many modern people prevent themselves from experiencing the fulfillment that they hope for by focusing so much on themselves’ (page 16)? He answers this question by arguing for a return to the moral vision of work as a calling, whereby ‘meaningful work’ is ‘good work’ that pursues the common and individual good together. Influenced strongly by the work of Robert Bellah et al. in the sociological classic Habits of the Heart, the author contends that the view of the calling orientation found there has given way to a view of calling based on self-interested rewards and individualistic concerns about how workers feel about doing good work.
The first two chapters show how the major academic literature on ‘work as a calling’ can be seen to have departed from the vision of Bellah et al. The author points out that ‘Contemporary notions of work as a calling stress that work should provide individuals with a deep sense of meaning and personal fulfillment. Such notions demand that work ought to be a therapeutic source of individual happiness’ and that ‘notions of “meaningful work” are often divorced from moral considerations about (a) good work (i.e., the production of excellent products/services), (b) the good of individual lives (including one’s very own), and (c) the common good of communities that one’s organization reaches’ (page 14-15). Thus, much of the existing literature sees a calling as being bound to identity exploration, such that accounts are centred on subjective fulfilment as distinct from the pro-social dimensions and communal goods that characterised traditional understandings. Even those authors who are critical of this trend ultimately themselves lapse into the individualistic outlook, or end up using its vocabulary. All of the leading authors in this field, while acknowledging their debt to Bellah, ultimately adopt an individualist position that is incompatible with his approach – incompatible because such an outlook both reduces pro-social tendencies and over-emphasises personal autonomy, with the result that notions of the meaningful life, ‘often construed in a consumeristic way, have become divorced from considerations about goods that are necessary for individual and communal flourishing’ (page 51).
Chapter 3 is a dense, theoretically heavy chapter that shows how heavily influenced Bellah’s vision of the calling orientation was by the practice-based theory of the virtues propounded by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s thought is complicated but in essence it sees virtues as excellences or dispositions of character that enable us to serve and achieve the internal goods of certain practices, sustaining those practices and helping us to flourish as individuals and communities. For example, architecture, as a practice, requires the achievement of certain types of excellence (professional and technical skill, the use of the right materials and so on) in order to bring about certain goods internal to the practice, such as excellent houses – rather than simply profit, which, though a good, is an external one. Where practitioners focus on external goods instead of the internal goods, they risk falling into certain kinds of vice (such as greed) and the practice suffers (with the construction of shoddy homes). As such, those genuine goods which enable us to flourish – as individuals, as communities of practitioners and as a society – lie outside of ourselves. Indeed, our preferences and desires need to be ‘tutored’, as it were; we have to learn, within a practice – a living tradition that is maintained and passed on with its own standards of excellence – and by deliberation with others over ends, what things are genuinely good, rather than focus on the fulfilment of those preferences that we do in fact happen to have. The author draws on this approach to distinguish between a true calling and a fake one: a true calling cannot ultimately be based on the individual’s un-schooled preferences, for ‘meaning emanates from one’s shared participation in good work that genuinely contributes to the flourishing of individuals and communities’ (page 60). A true calling cannot treat work as a means to personal fulfilment; rather, it must involve good work within a community of practice and sound judgement, which results in genuine goods, such that work has meaning and value in its own right.
The fourth chapter looks at the social implications of the fake, individualist calling. In the modern, Western world (particularly the U.S.) working as part of practice-based communities reflecting on genuine goods or ends that ought to be desired has given way to a focus on individual autonomy, and this has left the individual as the locus of value, with the preferences that he or she happens to have. This individualism – as expressed in fake callings which centre on maximising the satisfaction of preferences or expression of the self – is mirrored at the organisational level with a focus not on genuine goods to be pursued together, such as excellent products, but on ‘effectiveness’, by which is usually meant the maximisation of profit or production. In both individual and corporate life, ends are simply given, therefore, and all reflection is on the means of achieving them. In our Western society, these ends are shaped by consumerism, such that the meaning in life is not based on the development of virtues centred on individual and common goods, but on ‘achievement’, ‘self-realisation’, wealth, or making something of oneself at work. However, as the author points out, the individualist approach does not deliver what it promises, for it would appear that the more people pursue such forms of ‘fulfilment’, the less happy and meaningful they find their lives and work to be and the greater the incidence of problems such as anxiety, or the feeling of not being valued as a person by one’s employer (whose attempts to keep staff happy seem to consist of solutions that distract from dissatisfaction and restlessness at work, such as the provision of pinball machines or ping pong tables). Thus, there are various consequences of the ‘junk’ values on which contemporary fake callings are based, and the author connects them with the fragmentation of individual lives, for example, and the ‘burnout society’ described by the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han.
In the final chapter, in an effort to show how it is possible to reclaim the kind of life envisioned by Bellah et al., Potts gives several examples across various sectors (such as education, retail, food and drink and cybersecurity, among others) of what he, following Robert K. Greenleaf, calls ‘servant leaders’, who live in accordance with a true calling, focusing on the genuine goods of their work rather than their own untutored preferences. He outlines some of their characteristics – such as empathy, seeking to persuade rather than coerce, striving to build community, choosing service over self-interest, for instance – with a view to showing that a true calling orientation is possible. For each example, the author shows why the person is following a true calling, often referring to MacIntyrean notions – for example, reflecting on genuine goods, participating in a practice-based community, or providing an excellent service that benefits a community – or showing how that person embodies the characteristics of a servant leader.
The book is at its best in the two final chapters as the author turns to the ‘real-world’ effects of the misconceptions surrounding work as a calling and meaningful work. The discussion is very interesting and extends far beyond the very short and incomplete summary provided here. These chapters should be of interest to readers with general interests in such issues and could be read in isolation from the earlier chapters centred on understandings of Bellah and his reliance on MacIntyre’s thought, which themselves have a far more limited appeal. The analysis would suffer from such an approach, however, because it is in light of those earlier chapters that readers can see precisely why the individualist approach to work as a calling is mistaken and why it is associated with the societal problems identified by the author. Similarly, one can see why the servant leaders described by Potts are chosen as examples. While there is real value in chapters 4 and 5 for readers concerned with wider questions of business purpose and meaningful work, the book is clearly a scholarly volume, aimed at an academic readership. In its entirety, therefore, it can really only be recommended for those with academic interests in these areas, as well as some grounding in MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism and Bellah’s sociology.
Work as a Calling: From Meaningful Work to Good Work by Garrett W. Potts was published in 2022 by Routledge (ISBN: 978-0-36-772441-2). 164pp.
Neil Jordan is Senior Editor at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about Neil please click here.
The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) is pleased to announce the publication of:
Markets and the Environment:
Free Market Solutions to Environmental Problems?
John Kroencke
(PDF)
Web-friendly and divided into sections (clickable endnotes):
Is large-scale government intervention the only way to address environmental problems, such as climate change, over-fishing and particulate pollution? Markets and the Environment argues that markets are just as likely to be the solution. Assuming a simplistic dichotomy between markets and environmental protection can lead to the naïve conclusion that problems are ‘market failures’ of a kind which government intervention will be able to seamlessly correct by restraining market forces.
Instead, real-world comparative analysis is needed, which weighs the performance of alternative institutional and governance arrangements. The report explains and adopts the fundamental concepts of economics to examine both environmental problems themselves and policy approaches to addressing them. It develops a rigorous argument which draws on Coasean insights about transaction costs and the reciprocal nature of externalities.
After building up from the principles, it demonstrates how market-based solutions can achieve environmental goals more efficiently than traditional command-and-control regulations. That is, it is the solution to environmental problems often lies in introducing, not restraining, market forces. In some cases, government policy stands in the way of property rights and markets emerging, but in the toughest cases market-based regulation informed by economics offers a way forward and has had successes where implemented.
ISBN: 9781910666296
Dr John Kroencke is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. He joined the Centre in 2021 after completing his PhD in Economics at George Mason University. He spent the 2020–21 academic year as a final-year Fellow at the Centre for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. In 2023 he authored Private Planning and the Great Estates which explored the capacity of large landowners to capture spillover effects and engage in long-term planning by looking at the large urban estates of aristocratic and institutional landlords in inner London. John’s research focuses on the history of economics and on the intersection of markets and policy.
This is a spectacular book whose title only hints at its true ambition. Economist Richard Langlois brings depth to both the overarching framework and to finely crafted historical details. The book’s broad scope and rigorous analysis across 816 pages (a mere 550 pages of main text with extensive endnotes) can only be hinted at in a review.
At heart, Langlois offers a retelling of the conventional view of the rise of the managerial corporation that Alfred Chandler wrote on nearly fifty years ago in The Visible Hand. Chandler’s triumphalist account of the large, multidivisional, vertically integrated corporation was published in 1977, ironically just as the shifting economic sands and corporate raiders were already beginning to transform corporate life. Until that decade, the story seemed one of linear progress away from personal, entrepreneurial capitalism and toward managerial experts. This theme of a competent managerial elite replacing the messiness of the invisible hand of the market extended beyond the business world to policy and politics more broadly. This context is not lost in the book, and Langlois evokes the broader zeitgeist, drawing on the words of figures such as Herbert Croly and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Langlois’s core task is to explain the rise of managerial corporations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in light of the fact that market forces later dismantled these same large corporations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He does this with a deceptively simple theoretical argument and detailed economic history to substantiate his claims. I’ll examine these dimensions in turn.
The theoretical argument is straightforward. Building on the foundational work of Ronald Coase, we know that economic activities are organized within firms when the cost of achieving them via market transactions would be higher than organizing within the firm. That is, the visible hand of an integrated firm replaces the invisible hand of market relations when it is profitable for it to do so.
Langlois argues that large corporations proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not because they were a permanently superior institutional form, but because they filled a temporary institutional gap. Rapid technological change outpaced the development of market-supporting institutions—the legal frameworks, financial markets, and infrastructure that enable decentralized coordination. In this environment, integrated firms could organize complex production more efficiently than fragmented markets could. These corporations weren’t naturally better at resource allocation; they were simply the best available solution given the institutional constraints of their era. By the late twentieth century, as market-supporting institutions matured, the advantage of large integrated firms diminished, and many were dismantled or reorganized.
After an introductory chapter introducing the main concepts and the nuanced argument of the book in précis, the eight additional chapters and the long epilogue are arranged chronologically. The author deftly weaves a narrative that combines corporate, intellectual, and political history all analyzed through the mind of an economist who has read the empirical economic literature on relevant topics. At various stages, Langlois explains the role of these different forces on the organizational form of the corporation. The result is a synthesis—patchwork in parts—of the various threads needed for this multifaceted undertaking. Readers may get mired in the detail at times, but the amazing thing about Langlois’ enterprise is that he pulls it off and the result is a magisterial book that deserves to be read widely.
These varied threads are necessary because Langlois argues for the role of contingent history in the rise of the Chandlerian corporation. The role of government misapprehensions about business practices played a serious part in the tendency towards certain types of structures. Technological change and economies of scale can explain some industries, but the phenomenon was much broader. Furthermore, the continued dominance of the Chandlerian corporations is explained by the absence of sophisticated decentralized markets the development of which was hampered by antitrust efforts and shocks. There was a reason the market forces which rose at the end of the 20th century did not emerge in midcentury: the chaos of economic turbulence, world war and cold war. The space for an efficient make-or-buy decision was necessarily closed down when, as was often the case, the courts decided that contracts necessary for external contracting decisions are anticompetitive, or the empowered regulator like the Interstate Commerce Commission or Federal Communications Commission intervenes.
In the nineteenth century, commentators increasingly distinguished between closely held businesses and large businesses. Any history stresses the role of the railroad in the rise of professional management, but Langlois brings to life the economics of the business and the politics surrounding it. Through antitrust and regulations like those on the railroads, government changed the optimal institutional structure. Work in economic theory and history has helped explain the practices of businesses that contemporary legislators and regulators dismissed as anti-competitive.
Langlois’s argument is in summary that the business practices which led to government intervention were often efficiency-enhancing and the policy response was often harmful. When this included things like banning contracting practices this led to more business being done within the firm. This rather bold argument is aided by copious references to work in economics on 19th and 20th century business practices and the implications of government policy, making scholarship on this available to the general readers for the first time.
Perhaps most important for understanding the middle of the 20th century is the string of shocks, namely the two wars with unprecedented levels of war planning and the Great Depression that happened in the first half of the century. In general, these contingencies shifted the decision to bring elements within the firm instead of purchasing on the market. The years between 1914 and 1973 can in fact be viewed as the high watermark of state planning. As more time separates this period from the present, a conception of the degree of state planning and the worldview of the managerial elite in politics, economics, and business is lost.
Among the many terrible events, Langlois calls the Great Depression, the signal catastrophe and ‘a worldwide cataclysm that would alter the history of the century in the US more fundamentally and profoundly than even its two brutal wars’ (page 186). He argues, with supporting evidence, that for the United States the century’s worst year was 1933—the second dip in the Great Depression. Between the peak in 1929 and the low point in 1933 the Dow Jones dropped some 86 percent. Over this same time unemployment rose from 4 percent to 25 percent and estimates suggest that real per capita output dropped by 29 percent to a level not seen since 1901.
Drawing on the consensus in the literature, Langlois argues that this catastrophe was not caused by inherent features of capitalism that make it prone to break down or particular features of the 1929 crash itself but was the fallout from bad policy ideas which he dissects in detail. The crucial set of facts is that the Federal Reserve failed to act appropriately when it allowed the money supply to shrink and thereby unleashed the horrors of debt deflation. Beyond this central problem, the government attempted (among other things) to keep wages from falling in a delusional idea that high wages would allow the surplus of goods to clear. Many of the most egregious attempts of the New Deal were stopped by the courts, but there was a more general attempt to control markets.
In a key summarizing passage Langlois says of the Depression and war years:
The Second World War placed resource allocation even more firmly in the hands of the government and ushered in far more comprehensive nonmarket controls. Between fall 1929 and the end of World War II, prices in the United States often transmitted either false information or no information at all about relative scarcities, and many of the institutions upon which market exchange depended were hampered or destroyed. It is against this background, and not against a counterfactual backdrop of thick and well-functioning markets, that we must explain and appraise the rise of the large American corporation in the middle years of the twentieth century.
In a very interesting chapter, Langlois shows how dynamic market forces similar to those of the 1970s and beyond were already emerging in the 1920s but were diminished by the crisis. Across different industries innovative entrepreneurs were able to access capital and generate complex contracting networks solving assorted economic issues. General Motors and other companies (unlike Ford which because of its eccentric founder was steadfast in remaining optimized for the previous environment) would take advantage of responsive, modular supply chains. Even companies like DuPont sourced their patents not in the famous research labs of the midcentury but from acquisition. Much of this energy would become concentrated in the large corporations not because of their superiority as Chandler claimed, but because they were the only ones to survive the Depression. New restrictions on banking and forms of contracting limited new entrants and startups. Furthermore, the capacity of large firms to internally finance led to the growth of R&D departments at DuPont, GM, GE and others.
As Langlois writes:
The Depression and the policy responses to it had decisive consequences for the American corporation…. The dramatic monetary contraction, along with the failure of the Fed to act as an adequate lender of last resort, led to an amplifying cascade of bankruptcies and bank failures… this had the effect of destroying much of the capacity of the banking system, and of the financial system more generally, to supply financial intermediation. Small firms, which needed to rely on external capital markets, felt the effects far more than large firms, which could rely on internal financing and had close ties to large banks. Thus the Depression initiated or accelerated shakeouts in many industries. In some industries the process was Darwinian, with the most productive firms surviving; in others, survival depended simply on access to capital. At the same time, the New Deal instituted an unprecedented regime of price supports and entry restriction in financial, labor, and product markets. (187-88)
Absent these events one wonders how different the corporate world would have looked in the 1950s and 1960s.
Another merit of the book is the way it reflects on the way antitrust regulation, industrial policy and scientific and technological progress interacted and on the ideological and political context for them. Odd Progressive ideas underlay aspects of antitrust legislation and decisions of the FTC; odd monetary ideas underlay the decisions of the Fed. The science of industrial practices, whether in steel production or electronics, developed rapidly. Government and industry were closely intertwined in both world wars, and he discusses industrial policy at length in an even-handed but negative way. Another component of many chapters is Langlois’s focus on the role of finance, whether J.P. Morgan through the House of Morgan in earlier chapters or leveraged buyouts in the later chapters. Langlois also examines the form of pyramidal holding companies which was viewed as suspect by Progressives and partially banned in the New Deal. The demise of that form (unlike in the rest of the world) plays some role in explaining the American integrated firm and later conglomerates.
This level of historical detail and context makes the past come alive. Its coverage of the more recent past stands out as well. While the first 400 pages of the main text take readers from Standard Oil to Mad Men, the last 150 pages cover deregulation, disintermediation, and the rise of VC-backed startups. In the past decades, numerous books have been written about the revival of liberal thinking in the 1970s. Until that decade, for a variety of reasons, the story seemed one of linear progress away from personal, entrepreneurial capitalism and toward managerial experts. Many of these works suffer from depicting the changes as merely the actions of a few choice actors rather than a more widespread and diverse set of changes rooted in a disillusionment with the status quo. One illustrative example that Langlois discusses is the role of Ted Kennedy, no market fundamentalist, in the deregulation of trucking, rail, and air travel.
One of many dimensions to the book is that Langlois is seeking to undermine what he sees as a broader Progressive vision of society (he explains American Progressivism in detail and contrasts different varieties) that runs up to the present. The introduction and epilogue contain some understandably pointed remarks about the contemporary efforts by those on the right and left who have sought a more muscular state to regulate businesses. Many of these figures make explicit historical claims and hearken back to Progressive efforts to restrain the dominance of big business via antitrust and regulations banning practices like self-preferencing by Amazon. Building on the work of others, Langlois shows many ways in which past attempts failed to understand the efficiency of practices they villainized and how state regulation often empowered big business against markets and consumers. In doing so, he illuminates both past failures and the risks of repeating them. General readers may disagree with the broader view and specialists might have issues with one of the many episodes he covers, but The Corporation and the Twentieth Century is a tour de force.
‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise’ by Richard N. Langlois was published by Princeton University Press in 2023 and came out in paperback in 2025 (978-0-691-24753-3). 816pp.
John Kroencke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.
The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics was pleased to hold an event on 13 November 2025
Bishop of Oxford’s Office and the Church of England’s specialist on AI and tech within the Faith and Public Life Team
Tech Entrepreneur
If one wanted to run a political campaign as an idealist left-leaning technocrat, this would be the book to write or use as manifesto. A Brief History of Equality is Thomas Piketty’s attempt to synthesize multiple years of research into a manifesto (albeit one published by Harvard University Press) that a politician could pick up to showcase not only a consistent vision of the world but also the remedies and solutions to make a better one.
Piketty argues there have been strong egalitarian forces—generated via political action leading to institutional and social change—that have worked to moderate the natural forces of capitalism that increase inequality (the argument for this natural tendency is the subject of his famous Capital in the Twenty-First Century). It was the twentieth century—particularly the period from 1914 to 1980—that generated a long egalitarian trend because this is when the egalitarian counterforces gathered momentum: progressive taxation, expansion of public education, greater regulation and social welfare program policies. Ultimately, the proposal is to continue and expand these policies.
Beyond this, any reviewer faces a struggle after reading the book. How should it be reviewed? As political manifestos go, this is outstanding work. There is substance and coherence. At the same time, however, I doubt how much a politician can win on such a manifesto because the remedies offered are also accelerants to the forces of populism and illiberalism. The politics of redistribution can lead to tensions between those who pay and those who receive. This is why numerous economists point out that policies reducing the size of the state (in both scale and scope) are associated with less populism.
For example, when using ‘economic freedom’ indices—which weigh components such as property rights protections, free trade, business regulation, monetary policy, and the size of government—in conjunction with measures of political populism (both right and left), one finds that ‘economic freedom’ depresses populism. In other studies, what some call ‘welfare chauvinism’ is what drives anti-immigrant feelings (nativism). As Krishna Vadlamannati and Indra de Soysa summarized, the ‘positive effect of a bigger immigrant share of the population on support for nativist populism is conditional upon higher degrees of social welfare’ spending. In other words, the book proposes remedies that have fueled the rise of the populist right and left.
It is not surprising, then, that in Piketty’s home country of France, the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella (which seems poised to win in 2027) has been a confused mix of left-wing economic policies and right-wing identitarian ones. France, with its sprawling welfare state that goes well beyond what the near-totality of economists would call the optimally sized state, has already implemented most of what Piketty recommends—and it is precisely there that liberal democracy appears most threatened, both from the left and the right.
So, what if the book was reviewed on deeper grounds—that of the deeper scholarly arguments embedded in it? There, I feel I am hardly more positively inclined. This is because the book relies on research that has been heavily criticized in top journals and in ways that dramatically alter the interpretation of the evolution of inequality in western countries.
Consider chapters 6 and 7 where Piketty discusses the fall of income and wealth inequality from 1914 to 1980 and its partial reversal thereafter. Considerable (though not exclusive) attention is devoted to America in these chapters. The decline is causally assigned to the rise of the welfare state and higher tax rates on the rich. However, this ignores multiple works showing that inequality started to decline before 1914—an age tied to ‘laissez faire’ and free markets. The decline has recently been noticed when some researchers (including myself) pointed out that the prices of goods and services consumed by the poor fell faster than those consumed by the rich. This means there was ‘declining’ inequality in the cost of living. This most egalitarian force essentially reverses any increase in inequality between 1870 and 1914 between the top 10% and the bottom 90% and eliminates half of the measured increase in inequality between the top 1% and the bottom 90%. At the same time, there were massive improvements in living standards which means the poor were getting richer nearly as fast as the wealthy.
Then, when one accounts for spatial differences in price levels within the country (suggesting that real incomes differed less than nominal incomes), one further reduces the level of inequality. Because of internal migration, one also reduces the trend of inequality. Extending both adjustments from 1914 to 1941 shows that inequality did not behave at all as depicted. It either stagnated or declined between 1870 and 1941.
But this is not all. The tax data used has many known flaws that historians have long documented (and that contemporaries themselves knew about), but that Piketty has ignored even after their importance was pointed out to him. For example, it is well established that unlike today, tax evasion in America was the ‘poor man’s business’ prior to the introduction of tax withholding in 1943. This is because the IRS had too few resources to investigate anyone but the very rich, and it even advertised that it never really investigated tax returns below $5,000—essentially applying to everyone below the top 1%. The result was widespread evasion below the top 1%. This evasion affects both the estimate of income of the ‘higher income groups’ and the total income of society (because tax evasion also depressed the source materials downward). The result is that we know tax evasion leads to an overestimation of inequality before 1943. By how much? Take any estimate pre-1943 and cut one fifth of it—that is the effect of tax evasion below the top 1% on the estimates of inequality.
Probably most egregiously, Piketty, alongside his co-authors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, was shown to have misused and misunderstood the tax data they employed while making crude assumptions to estimate inequality—even though data that would have avoided these assumptions existed in an easily available form. Correcting these errors (which I documented here before), I have shown that the level of inequality prior to 1943 is overestimated by roughly one fifth of what is reported. Combining this with the effect of evasion mentioned above is difficult because the corrections for the multiple errors of Piketty and Saez overlap with some of those to correct for evasion. However, all the clearly independent corrections suggest that a quarter of pre-1943 inequality is ‘artificial’.
Moreover, most of the decline in inequality did not happen in 1943 with the advent of a more robust tax administration, higher tax rates, and a more generous welfare state. Most of it occurred between 1929 and 1935—during the Great Depression, when virtually everyone was getting poorer. Separate independent works have pushed in exactly the same direction. A large share of the decline is due to the errors but it is computed by the use of a far-less than ideal statistical method. When we shift to a method that is more data-driven and give far fewer degrees of freedom to researchers, we see that the level of inequality is further overestimated by a bit less than one twenty-fifth of the level. Moreover, the errors induced by Piketty and Saez’s choice of method are mostly concentrated in the 1940s in ways that artificially enhance their story. With the superior data method, the majority of the decline occurred during the Depression as a result of collapsing incomes (and notably capital gains income, which is to say the income of the rich).
The overall level and movements of inequality are so massively changed—something which is also confirmed in multiple other pieces of research showing the poor understanding and shoddy treatment of the data by Piketty and his acolytes—that it leads one to accept to a more familiar claim that the only forces that can massively reduce inequality in a short period of time are wars and other catastrophes (e.g., the Great Depression). The tax policies and welfare state praised by Mr. Piketty played a minor support role.
Things only get worse from there since the argument is that the reversal of the golden age of egalitarianism from 1914 to 1980 is due to a reversal of social-democratic policies (and a turn to far more ‘liberal’ policies). In recent years, a great deal of attention has been dedicated to the estimates of inequality after the 1960s. They all show the same thing. For example, Gerald Auten and David Splinter show that the ‘golden age’ of equality was overstated. Once correcting for tax policies that altered how income was reported, they find inequality rose far more modestly. Whereas Piketty estimates the top 1% share of income rising from between 12% and 14% in the 1960 to 1980 period to 20% today, Auten and Splinter place it at between 8% and 10% in the 1960 to 1980 period with a rise to 14% today. Those results are confirmed in separate works using different methods.
Auten and Splinter also reveal that after taxes and redistribution, inequality has not risen since 1960—despite smaller government and lower tax rates—undercutting Piketty’s case for high taxation and expansive welfare states. That finding is echoed in the work of Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller and Natasha Sarin, who showed that once the valuation of social security (National Insurance in Britain) is accounted for, there are no wealth inequality changes between 1960 and today. The welfare state, despite claims to it being slashed, did what it aimed to do—redistribute and moderate inequality. Given that social security is only a part of the welfare state, this also indicts the broader claims that massive expansions of the welfare state generated the golden age.
Other parts of the book are even more problematic than this. Chapter 8 is one of the lesser offenders in that matter. There, Piketty speaks of educational equality. This is in line with a standard view in economics that human capital is important to growth and that inequality affects the capacity to make human capital investments for poor people. Nothing controversial there even if there are quibbles on details. In any case, the importance of human capital to growth and development (especially of the poor) is empirically well documented. When discussing the leveling of 1914 to 1980 and then when discussing what would be needed to generate further leveling in the future, the answer is ‘more education’ and ‘more educational access’. The problem is that there is an implicit assumption that all of the gains in human capital can be attributed to the state’s efforts to provide schooling. Ergo, since schooling reduced inequality and schooling is state-provided, more state-provided schooling is needed. There is a vast literature showing that state provision of education is often of low-quality in developing countries and that a sizable chunk of improvements in human capital (which then contributed to reductions in global economic inequality) actually comes from the market–based provision of schooling. Moreover, empirical studies of ‘educational mobility’—which compare the educational attainment of parents with that of their children—as well as studies of educational achievements over time (without comparing children and parents) consistently indicate that regions characterized by lower tax burdens and greater economic freedom exhibit higher levels of upward mobility in education and higher levels of educational achievements.
In other words, the very institutional arrangements and policy frameworks that Piketty criticizes as obstacles to equality appear, in practice, to foster intergenerational progress in educational achievement. Far from hindering mobility, economic freedom and moderate taxation seem to create an environment in which children are more likely to surpass the educational outcomes of their parents. What this chapter amounts to is a complaint about ‘not enough’ (an arguably fair complaint) and then a series of rehashed clichés about solutions for which there are good reasons (not discussed and ignored) to believe would make things worse.
The most important criticism, however, concerns something barely mentioned in the book—social mobility. The word mobility itself appears only once (page 121). There is a well-documented link between inequality and social mobility, with the logical connection being that inequality limits the ability of the poor, all else equal, to seize opportunities for upward advancement relative to the rich. This is why some speak of the ‘social reproduction of inequality,’ often with tedious distinctions that are without real differences. Yet, that argument has merit. Yet another, equally (and maybe even superior) meritorious argument exists: market–based economies systematically display higher intergenerational and intra-generational income and social mobility.
Using economic freedom indices (notably the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World), one can assume that higher scores correspond to more capitalist economies with more liberal policies—precisely less of what Piketty prescribes. Evidence shows that ‘big liberalizations’ not only raise average incomes but also lift those in the bottom deciles along with the top, leaving inequality relatively unchanged. Conceptually similar results apply to economically disadvantaged groups such as women who gain noticeably from liberalizations (there is evidence that this applies to minority groups as well). Crucially, such liberalizations also generate large increases in income mobility. These causal results align with a growing body of associational studies linking economic freedom to greater upward mobility—relationships consistently stronger than those between inequality and mobility.
The reason for this connection is that the welfare state advocated by Piketty does have some potential for uplifting. However, through taxation, it can also discourage effort and innovation, thereby pushing people down. A modest welfare state—designed to target help while minimizing these downsides—is possible. Such a welfare state can be found in the visions of Milton Friedman and Charles Murray (libertarians), Marcel Boyer and Peter Lindert (social democrats), and Arthur Brooks (a conservative). Yet the key ingredient accompanying it must be open markets, minimal regulation, a limited state, and secure property rights (another term that appears only rarely in the book, and when it does, it carries a soupçon of disdain). Ignoring this point—as I was compelled to emphasize earlier in a symposium in Analysis & Kritik (in which Piketty participated, alongside my coauthor Nick Cowen of the University of Lincoln, to discuss another book which is a longer pre-iteration of this book)—is essential for Piketty. After all, the book is a political manifesto. It is not meant to engage with academic or scholarly arguments.
Indeed, to paraphrase Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, little beside remains of A Brief History of Equality. Round the decay of its pretensions to scholarly output, the only monument left standing is a political manifesto. If the mighty seek to run for office, they may find some use in these pages; so too might Piketty himself, should ambition turn him toward politics. But manifestos are poor substitutes for analysis. They bend to fashion and fleeting desires for fame and popularity, drift with the winds of ideology, and mistake slogans for substance. What endures is not truth, but rhetoric. And, as with so many manifestos before, the time will come when even this too will be forgotten—leaving nothing besides.
‘A Brief History of Equality’ by Thomas Piketty was published in 2022 by Harvard University Press (ISBN: 978-0-674-27355-9. 288pp.
Vincent Geloso is assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and fellow at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en analyse des organisations (CIRANO). He has published multiple articles on estimating historical income inequality in multiple journals such Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, Cliometrica and Southern Economic Journal. He is also senior economist for the Institut économique de Montréal.
Magnuson, a professor of corporate law, has compiled a detailed and entertaining narrative of the key episodes in corporate history that documents how the corporation has been deployed by society’s problem-solvers. The corporation is a distinct form of human organisation that pre-dates many of those we take most for granted, such as the democratic nation state and even the Church. In Magnuson’s prosaic account, rich in surprising details, corporations are not seen as individual agents that pursue goals we can easily evaluate as simply good or evil. Rather, they are an organisational tool that enable human beings to cooperate at scale to do things that human beings might want to do, for better or worse. In their success, they transform the world around them, and often create new problems to solve. They are always impressive, but never morally pure.
The legal privilege that constitutes the corporation is what makes them useful both to society in general and to particular people’s purposes. Corporations survive the death of their members, and therefore, so do their fiduciary obligations. When undertaking large-scale and long-term projects, it makes one more attractive to creditors if the project is known to continue even if its individual members might come and go, have a career change, go bankrupt, or even die. With the reach of human agency transcending the life time and changeable circumstances of any individual, corporations can achieve what would otherwise be impossible.
For most of recorded human history, the main source of organisational capacity in society has been the state. It is the state, therefore that originally created the corporation through granting, at its discretion, this peculiar form of legal privilege. From the first corporations of Rome to the early 19th century in England, those who wanted to avail themselves of incorporation would need to be granted such a privilege by the state. For the state to agree to creating this impersonal legal agent for your purposes, it generally needed to be shown that it was also in the state’s interests to do so, and not just the entrepreneur’s. At its very conception, then, there was the possibility of divergent or even conflicting interests between the agent who controls the corporation and the agent that grants it its status.
A fascinating aspect of this history of the corporation is that they are shown to be in one sense distinctively ‘private’ entities in that they are definitionally not states. But on the other hand, they are explicitly creatures of the state. In earlier epochs the way in which corporations served state interests was much clearer – they collected taxes, lent capital, subdued foreign lands to the glory of their sovereign, etc. A corporation could only be created if it did in fact serve the interests of its state (for better or for worse – the interests of the state have not very neatly converged with the interests of the general public for much of human history). Magnuson makes this tension vivid. However, it does leave us confused as to why he sometimes refers to the corporations of the ancient and pre-modern world as ‘capitalists.’
Over the course of the 18th to early 19th centuries (in Western Europe) incorporation went from being a discretionary legal privilege to being an impersonal, general right. One now has to fill out the forms and pay the taxes, but one does not need to persuade the sovereign of the virtues of one’s intentions. The discipline of the market is what now regulates which corporations get to exist or not, rather than the discretion of the sovereign. What this means, which is well shown in the second half of the book, is that profitability takes the place of perceived service to the realm. Magnuson impresses upon the reader that profitability is a good, but imperfect, measure of a corporations’ contribution to society. What he somewhat elides, however, is that its imperfections are so much less serious than those of premodern corporations. Serving Rome meant imposing arbitrary taxes that often left people literally starving; bringing glory to England often meant war and slaughter. Whilst the difference in the way corporations functioned before and after this revolution in corporate law took place is made vividly clear in the book, Magnuson does not explicitly mention the legal changes themselves. Analysis of this change would, I think, help him to ground the normative conclusions he lays out at the end.
The book is divided into seven periods of corporate history, told through the story of a particular corporation or industry that defined its era. In the beginning was the corpus economicus of the Roman Republic, first created to raise private funds for the overstretched military ambitions of Rome, and then to collect taxes on behalf of the later territorially stretched Republic. Such ‘tax-farming’ was the standard way states raised revenue. It was not until the dawn of early modernity that states had the bureaucratic capacity to do it themselves and thereby cut out the middle man. Such middle men were essentially local gangsters who extorted as much as they could from the population because a fixed sum was owed to Rome, and they got to keep any surplus they could squeeze out (hence the New Testament’s constant equation of tax-collectors and sinners). Rome could never have ascended to the power it did without them. But, inevitably, they became a source of political and economic interests unto themselves, separate from the Republic. Next comes the first bank, started by the Medicis, which made available huge amounts of wealth for European princes and merchants, as well as the Church, and were able to manipulate their debtors in the interests of their own long-term profits. Then we come to the joint-stock companies of England, created for seafaring trade to generate revenue for the Crown and bring glory to the realm. The most famous among them, the East India Company, would become so rich and powerful, with its own armies, currency, and slaves, that it was a de facto state in India. Eventually it became such a rival to England herself that the Crown would, bit-by-bit, take it over. Next, we turn to the American railroad companies that were granted monopolies for the purposes of connecting and thereby modernising a vast and internally conflicted country. The particular way in which they were granted privileges over land and the trade that would take place on their rails presented various opportunities for them to exploit, which would inform a whole era of American anti-trust legislation. The next episode occurs firmly within a legal and economic context in which corporations no longer had any special privileges but rather had to compete with one another on legal terms that tended to favour value-creation and efficiency over government favour. Henry Ford’s ambitious and successful plan to make a high-quality vehicle every working American family could afford required no special monopoly privileges but rather an innovative technology (the petrol-powered engine) and production method (the assembly line). Then the narrative moves onto multinational oil companies, which, on the one hand were able to coordinate oil supply far better than separate nations were, and on the other used their wealth and influence to suppress climate change science. The final two chapters are on private equity, and then Facebook as the archetypal tech start-up. In both cases, head-spinning profitability was reached at lightning speed. While there is no doubt they provide value to society, it is also clear they found ways to make profits without creating value, in the former case through arbitrage of the tax code, and in the latter case by purposefully drawing on compulsive human behaviour.
Magnuson says from time to time that profit-maximisation is what often leads to corporate abuse. However, by his own account Ford was driven by keeping his profits low so as to keep quality and volume as high as possible, and prices as low as possible so that all Americans could afford one of his cars. From time-to-time Magnuson invokes various cliches about corporations being short-termist. But this is in tension with the general idea that what corporations do is enable longer-term planning and risk-bearing investment than individuals are otherwise capable of. Nonetheless, the driving normative lesson from this fantastic account Magnuson has compiled is that corporations are a tool of human ingenuity, and human ingenuity is not always benign. He gives many examples of how well societies tend to respond to the new problems introduced by corporations – typically in the form of adaptive regulation – but this should in no way give corporations or the entrepreneurs that wield them moral permission to disregard their consciences, and tell themselves that whatever is good for them must be good for the public. This is a fascinating book and one of which there is very much more to speak about!
‘For Profit: A History of Corporations’ by William Magnuson was published in 2023 by Basic Books (ISBN: 978-1-541-60157-4). 368pp.
Billy Christmas is Associate Professor at West Virginia University, in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, affiliated with the Kendrick Center for an Ethical Economy.
Prior to joining WVU he was Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at King’s College London, in the Department of Political Economy.
How We Found Our Callings
While all definitions of calling share in common the notion that work becomes meaningful within a person’s life, they differ on whether the source of the calling is internal, based on one’s own values, needs, and preferences, or external, based on either a calling from a higher power, a ‘transcendent summons,’ or a sense of fulfilling one’s destiny. Our own academic work together – which began with research on how the work of 9/11 victims was seen in the eyes of their close relations, and which has led to the publication of two books and several scholarly papers – feels secular in origin. We were both called to academia within a year of 9/11, when we were both living and working in New York City as management consultants, and although the call came from both a world in need of repair and from inside of us, it did not in our experience come from on high.
Religious and Secular Callings in the Financial Capital of the World
The first name on the New York City Medical Examiner’s list of casualties of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is that of Father Mychal Judge. He died carrying out his calling amid danger, praying to God over victims when he was killed by falling debris. Many people who died that day in a variety of uniforms were characterized as having lived out their callings, according to research we conducted. Most obviously, included are first responders like Jonathan Ielpi, a firefighter who followed his father into a profession in which he was ‘more concerned about others than he was about himself,’ Whether or not those callings were equally heroic, their origins were not always overtly religious.
Some callings sounded decidedly secular in origin, such as those of trader Frank Garfi, who ‘found a job that suited him precisely…fast-paced, demanding and as power-filled as an extreme sport,’ and trader Atsushi Shiratori, who was ‘so obsessed with the stock market that he once spent a two-week vacation in a day-trading salon. Sheryl Rosenbaum, who had known since her childhood visits to her father’s accounting office that ‘this was what she wanted to do,’ continued while she raised two young children of her own.
The History of Religious Callings
The notion of work as a calling has religious origins. As fellow management scholars Stuart Bunderson and Jeff Thompson detail in one of the foundational academic studies of calling toward work, the Protestant Reformation – and specifically the writings of Martin Luther – witnessed the transition of ‘calling’ from a narrow association with clergy work to a broader association with potentially any type of work. The important part was performing one’s work diligently and faithfully, laying the foundation for Max Weber’s notion of the Protestant Work Ethic.
This historical period also marked the culmination of a gradual transition of perceptions of work ‘from curse to calling,’ in the words of philosopher Joanne Ciulla. In Ancient Greece, work – especially manual labor – was seen as drudgery, punishment, and a distraction from one’s main goal of living a good life which was fully experienced in the life of the mind and certain types of leisure pursuits. When work becomes a calling, it becomes not a means to an end, but a meaningful end unto itself, a way to make a unique contribution to the world. The religious view of calling still has purchase in today’s conversations, in both scholarly writings and in the popular press. However, a different view has also emerged more recently that takes this same spirit into an explicitly non-religious context.
The Rise of Calling as a Secular (and Managerial) Concept
In another study, Thompson and Bunderson suggest that religious callings are typically ‘outside-in,’ emphasizing ‘destiny and duty’ and anchored in ‘societal obligations or an external summons.’ They contrast them with secular conceptualizations of calling that are typically ‘inside-out,’ emphasizing ‘passion and self-fulfillment’ and anchored in ‘internal preferences.’ Proponents of the former may express skepticism about whether the latter constitute ‘true’ callings. Proponents of the latter may doubt whether duty absent the passion to carry it out is sufficient to constitute a calling. Proponents of both tend to recognize that the best callings are those in which one feels to called in one’s heart to do what one is called by the world to do – or, in the words of theologian Frederick Buechner, ‘where your deep hunger and the world’s deep gladness meet.’
By the mid-1970s, when the field of management and organizational behavior was gaining traction as an academic discipline, scholars and other writers were increasingly considering work as a calling in a non-religious sense. For example, Studs Terkel’s famous compendium of interviews, Working, had a section titled, ‘In Search of a Calling’ that featured an editor, an industrial designer, and a nun-turned-massage therapist.
Jobs, Careers, and Callings
The presence of calling in management research – where we first encountered it – originated with a book by Robert Bellah and colleagues, Habits of the Heart. This book was not about callings or even work – the section on work was just over five pages long, the same length as a section on ‘leaving church’ – but rather about understanding how Americans’ private lives contributed to or detracted from their civic engagement. Yet, the writings about work proved to have a profound and outsized impact in codifying how ordinary people relate to their work. Based on interviews, the authors distinguished between work as a job or a means to make money, a career or a means to climb a career ladder, or a calling where work is a meaningful end in itself and ‘morally inseparable from [a person’s] life.’
These categories were further popularized and disseminated when they became the subject of study within organizational psychology by Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues as one of three work orientations. In a pioneering study, Wrzesniewski found that, compared to a job or career orientation, employees who viewed their work as a calling reported greater satisfaction with work and with life and missed fewer days of work. As in Martin Luther’s view, any work could be viewed as a calling by the person holding it – even seemingly low-paid, low-status, and/or ‘dirty work,’ from hospital cleaners to zookeepers to administrative assistants. As a psychological construct, work orientation held that two people with the same position in an organization could come to view their jobs in wildly different ways: one a job, the other a calling.
What Do We Know Today?
Callings Can Be Sacred And/Or Secular
Academic research on work as a calling has exploded in the past two decades, which almost exactly mirrors a focus in the popular press on finding one’s calling through work. Reviews of calling research are quick to note the dual (if not dueling) perspectives on whether callings are sacred or secular. The neoclassical view of calling preferred by Bunderson and Thompson aims to build directly on the classical, religious view put forth by Luther and later Weber, defining calling as ‘that place in the occupational division of labor in society that one feels destined to fill by virtue of particular gifts, talents, and/or idiosyncratic life opportunities.’ The modern view, articulated by Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas, defines calling as ‘a consuming, meaningful passion people experience toward a domain, such as work.’
Both Kinds of Calling are Paths to a ‘Good Life’
A recent meta-analysis, of which Jen was a coauthor, examined more than 200 empirical studies of calling over the past 20 years, finding that experiencing a strong calling toward one’s work was related to a sense that one’s life was good. Whether a function of our work-centered modern culture, or of some jobs becoming objectively ‘better’ in post-industrial society, work is no longer necessarily a curse. The meta-analysis authors then looked at whether the type of calling, internal/modern or external/neoclassical, related to different types of well-being, hedonic (happiness or pleasure) or eudaimonic (meaningfulness, purpose, and self-realization). Both internal and external callings related to both types of well-being; however, internal callings were more strongly related to hedonic well-being, while external callings were more related to eudaimonic well-being.
What Does This Mean for Workers?
Callings Have Great Benefits…
In any case, possibly because we spend so much of our waking time at work, feeling that work has positive meaning has the potential to enhance our own and others’ flourishing. This is especially so with eudaimonic well-being, which can be supported by callings whether they are religious or secular in origin.
…And Can Come at Great Costs
Yet, the picture of how callings contribute to our lives is complicated, because they often demand sacrifices that can have deleterious effects on our well-being. The zookeeper study, which employed a neoclassical lens, portrayed calling as ‘a painfully double-edged sword.’ On one hand, a sense of calling elevated the importance and meaningfulness of work in subjects’ lives; on the other hand, it required sacrifices in the form of pay, long hours, and even social esteem. Further research supports that, regardless of whether callings are seen as secular or religious, they are intensely-felt and may involve a host of irrational behavior, from over-estimating one’s ability at work to ignoring the advice of trusted mentors to sacrificing money. A study of church ministers found that those with strongest callings had the hardest time disengaging from work at the end of the day, which in turn negatively affected their sleep quality and their vigor the next morning.
Callings are Worth Pursuing…
All of this is to say that, if we are fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter, we should choose wisely about whether to pursue work as a calling and which callings are worth pursuing. We should be realistic about what to expect of a calling, because even people who love their work may not be happy about the sacrifices and demands it requires every day. The cliché that if you ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’ is often false, as anyone who has so much passion for their work can attest when the lines between their personal and professional lives blur to the point that they cannot escape work. We should also be mindful about whether some callings are ‘better’ than others. In our 9/11 research, which was based on close relations’ idealized reflections of how they wished their loved ones’ lives to have been, we found not only that a disproportionate share of victims were depicted as having worked at a calling but also that those callings which emphasized helping others and cultivating relationships with them were particularly admired. In those portraits of victims’ lives, their close relations found reasons for why even the most mundane or low status work – including that of receptionists and security guards and window washers – might have been worth loving.
…But Are Not a Panacea
As university professors, we counsel students not to feel undue pressure to ‘find their callings,’ especially as a surefire path to a perfect life. We teach them that some people are born knowing exactly what they were called to do and others search their entire lives in vain for a calling. They can’t control which one they might be, but it is within their control to carefully consider what pursuits are worth undertaking in a life worth living.
Jennifer Tosti-Kharas is the Camilla Latino Spinelli Endowed Term Chair and Professor of Management at Babson College.
Christopher Wong Michaelson is the Barbara and David A. Koch Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership at the University of St. Thomas and on the Business and Society faculty at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Jen and Christopher are the authors of Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2024) and The Meaning and Purpose of Work: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Considering What Work is For (London: Routledge, 2025).
It has been reported that Ribbon AI, a Canadian company, is offering employers a new form of screening interview conducted by artificial intelligence. With a view to helping organisations hire staff more quickly and job-seekers find work sooner by cutting out ‘dead time’ in the recruitment process, early stage job interviews are conducted in a fashion similar to a remote interview, with applicants responding to questions and prompts from a natural sounding voice, generated by AI.
The idea is that the AI interview saves time for job-seekers, who get to interview almost immediately rather than waiting for two or three weeks until a member of the HR department can see them. Ribbon does not make decisions about candidates; rather, it provides companies with applicants’ responses to questions, offering transcripts, summaries, analyses and scoring of candidates’ responses, which the company can then use to inform its decisions according to internal criteria and requirements. As such, it is intended that companies should gather information about candidates and assess their suitability for roles more efficiently than by way of an early-stage screening interview.
It is worth pausing to ask what candidates are being expected to do here.
It is not uncommon for companies to ask applicants to complete psychometric tests prior to offering an interview and with increasing frequency, candidates will also be provided with set questions and instructed to submit answers recorded using a web-cam. Anyone Who has been through such a process might have experienced certain misgivings. The rationale behind including tests is intelligible (though it is not always clear whether they really determine which candidates possess the skills requisite for the role on offer) but recording answers can feel artificial. We might wonder what is to be gained by this approach, and why the hiring company is unwilling to talk to candidates in person at this stage, particularly if it is serious about ultimately hiring and investing in a member of staff. In any event, if the recorded answers are assessed by a member of HR staff or a hiring manager, it is not clear how far such an approach is any more efficient than a short, standard-format interview. Perhaps the most sympathetic view is to see such an approach as being akin to recording a spoken assessment as part of a remote learning course, perhaps in modern languages. Strange as it feels to be speaking (in)to a machine, candidates assume that the recording will at least be properly assessed by a human being at some stage.
In this instance, however, it seems that candidates are being expected to speak to and interact with a machine as though that machine were the human interviewer. An applicant is in effect asked to hold a conversation with an interlocutor that has no consciousness, is unaware of the interviewee’s existence and understands neither the candidate’s answers nor even its own questions. In such a situation, there can be said to be no conversation at all and therefore, arguably no interview. This is a peculiar arrangement, whereby an applicant is expected to behave as though a non-conscious object is interviewing her.
Moreover, her responses are not necessarily going to be sent to a human assessor for consideration at all. Rather, a decision might very well be made based on an analysis and data produced by the AI based on her responses. These analyses may be less biased and more uniform than would be possible for human interviewers, but the applicant has been ‘interviewed’ and ‘assessed’ by a machine. She might be rejected without any human consideration of the actual performance itself at all. Instead, the candidacy depends on a view taken of a computer generated assessment of that performance.
What does such an approach suggest about a company’s attitude to applicants, when it chooses to have them prove themselves before a machine before granting any meaningful human interaction?
Andrei Rogobete has written about the need for a human-centric AI, stating that AI ‘ought to be embraced in a prudent manner that directs its contributions towards human thriving’. In arguing for a use of AI that benefits humanity first and foremost and does not deify machines, he quotes Pope John-Paul II’s call for humanity to ‘use science and technology in a full and constructive way, while recognizing that the findings of science always have to be evaluated in the light of the centrality of the human person (and) of the common good’.
If we are to make responsible use of artificial intelligence for the good of humanity, the technology ought to be restricted to those tasks which any given form of AI performs well, so that it brings clear, tangible benefits to all relevant parties. Crucially, the dignity of the human beings that this form of technology is to serve should always be our foremost consideration. It is pertinent to ask, therefore, whether reducing interviews – for which candidates will often prepare carefully and about which they are ordinarily nervous – to a confected and solipsistic ‘conversation’ with a non-conscious AI model rather than meaningful engagement with other human beings is indicative of such an approach. Is it consistent with human dignity to base decisions about an individual’s potential livelihood not on a meaningful conversation with that person – and perhaps not even directly on her responses themselves – but on the reduction of her performance to a collection of data and analytics produced by artificial intelligence – artificial intelligence which has not seen or heard, let alone engaged with or understood the person in question?
The Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics (CEME) was pleased to host a roundtable event on the topic of non-executive directors.
The full report is available to download here.
The role of the non-executive director is essential to the proper functioning of corporate governance. The expectations on directors have been tested by corporate scandal. What are the reasonable expectations that society places on those that undertake this task and what are the appropriate legal responsibilities?
The event was chaired by Richard Turnbull and our main speaker was John Wood, Lecturer in Company and Insolvency Law at Lancaster University’s School of Law. He has a particular interest in the law around the duties of directors and has published numerous articles and several books.
This event took place on Thursday, 12th December in the Council Room at One Great George Street, London SW1P 3AA.
