The Corporation
'Imagine your company were a person. What kind of person would it be?'
It's a popular question among management consultants and executive coaches on company away-days. However, according to legal definitions, the corporation already is a person - to the extent, at least, that it enjoys all the rights to life, liberty and property as an individual human being.
Unlike humans, however, who must answer to the people around us, the corporation is accountable only to its bottom line - according, that is, to the producers of the skilful and riveting (though lengthy) documentary film The Corporation.
Based on Joel Bakan's book of the same title, the filmmakers investigate the attitudes and behaviour of corporations towards a fistful of issues: genetic engineering, environmental degradation, exploitative labour, the privatisation of the world's 'commons' (including water and air), disregard for safety standards and marketing to children. Their data is interwoven with interviews from a colourful array of CEOs and economists such as Mark Moody-Stuart and Milton Friedman, and intellectuals and activists including Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.
All the evidence, the producers contend, points to a clear diagnosis: the contemporary corporation is a 'psychopath', displaying no sense of guilt for the damage it is causing to the planet and its creatures.
Whatever one makes of this analysis, the film raises profound theological questions. If, for instance, the corporation is a person, in what ways does it reflect God's image? Can it experience guilt and redemption? Does it, indeed, have a soul?
And if, as the film maintains, the chief cause of the corporation's ailment is the notion of 'limited liability' (for both share-holders and directors), what does the Bible have to say about the divorce in the relationship between owning a company and being responsible for its actions?
Such questions are as much practical as they are theoretical, for many people spend their working life within companies. This is where lives are shaped and challenged. This is where people fall in and out of love. This is where personalities and vocations are developed and thwarted and worldviews formed and re-formed. If the church is to be effective in its pastoral and prophetic ministry, we need to understand today's corporations and seek to direct their development in the interests of the common good.
So, let's use our imagination. If your company - or the company whose products and services you use - were a person, what kind of person would you like it to become?
Peter Heslam
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