Corporate governance
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Corporate governance is the collection of mechanisms, processes and relations by which corporations are controlled and operated.
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Corporate republic
A corporate republic is a theoretical form of government run primarily like a business, involving a board of directors and executives, in which all aspects of society are privatized by a single, or small groups of companies. The ultimate goal of this state is to increase the wealth of its shareholders, and the government acknowledges its status as a corporation. Utilities, including hospitals, schools, the military, and the police force, would be privatized. The social welfare function carried out by the state is instead carried out by corporations in the form of pensions and benefits to employees.
Corporate republics do not exist officially in the modern history. Modern competition laws and the development of modern nation-states help prevent such a company from gaining or being granted that amount of political power. Historical states, such as post-classical Florence and the East India Company, might be said to have been governed as corporate republics. Political scientists have also considered state socialist nations (criticised as state capitalist) to be forms of corporate republics, with the state assuming full control of all economic and political life and establishing a monopoly on everything within national boundaries - effectively making the state itself equatable to a giant corporation.
Corporate republics are used in works of science fiction or political commentary as a warning of the perceived dangers of capitalism. In such works, they usually arise when one or more vastly powerful corporations depose a government either over an extended time period via regulatory capture or swiftly in a coup d'état.
Examples
See also: List of chartered companies
The typical examples of corporate republics throughout history are typically the imperial East India Companies and other such chartered companies during the early modern era, such as the VOC, or the Honorable East India Company. Lesser known examples are the predecessor to the Congo Free State, the International Association of the Congo, the British South Africa Company, and the Langfang Republic
See also
- Banana republic
- Company town
- Corporatization
- Corporatocracy
- Evil corporation
- Kongsi republic
- Megacorporation
- Congo Free State
- Timocracy
See also
- Agency cost
- Basel II
- Corporate Law Economic Reform Program Act 2004
- Corporate social entrepreneurship
- Corporate transparency
- Creative accounting
- Earnings management
- Fund governance
- Golden parachute
- International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions
- King Report on Corporate Governance
- Legal origins theory
- Private benefits of control
- Risk management
- Social ownership
- Sociocracy
- Stakeholder theory
