Corporate personhood and corporate people: an analytic addendum
If corporations are people, what type of people are they?
Behind our hot takes on societal metaphors, there are (we hope) carefully considered analyses, a bit too dry perhaps to include in a snappy newsletter. But after a couple of conversations about the structure of last week’s post, I think it’s a good moment to dig into the analytical steps that precede our arguments.
When we’re considering the potential societal impacts of a given metaphor, what we are doing is looking for specific correspondences between conceptual domains. We then antagonize whether those correspondences are sensible, and what knockdown effects each correspondence may have on our understanding of the concepts in question. To clarify what the heck that actually means, let’s go through this for corporations and people.
We begin by breaking down both concepts into their core elements and associated attributes.[1]
People are human individuals, with bodies and agency. Those bodies are mortal and have particular needs and affordances (e.g. we need to eat and breath; we perceive the physical world through different senses). Agency then enables us to choose how we interact with the world and each other (we create, play, talk, compete, collaborate, etc., etc.), and that agency is shaped by a complex of emotions, values , and beliefs. People, as social beings, live in community and organize themselves into various social units; families, friend groups, societies…
We know a lot about ourselves, and so could go on and on here. But that’s a good start.
Most of us probably have less to say about corporations. We know that they are organizations of some kind, made up of people occupying different roles, and some of those roles are much more powerful than others (from CEO and other board members, down to employees in service and maintenance positions). We have an idea of offices, perhaps, and departments like finance and marketing. We know that money is definitely involved, and that they are a part of our economy. We know that corporations are doing well when they make a profit and can increase their production. We know that they can fail, and then sometimes the government bails them out.
With these brainstormed elements, we then look for specific correspondences between the two concepts, “mappings” that match particular elements from the source concept (people) to the target concept (corporations). If corporations are people, then elements of a corporation should also be understood as elements of a person. Let's consider a small handful of these.
If corporations are people, then…
- Corporations have a body.
Like many organizations made up of real-life bodies (nations are the most well-studied example), corporations are understood as having a body, made up of functionally distinct parts. There is always a “head” (the CEO), sometimes a “heart” (e.g. the founder). Beyond these colloquialisms though, it is this mapping of a corporation’s organizational structure to a body that encourages us (ironically) to see real-life individuals working within the corporation as non-autonomous. Corporate workers fulfill their role within the corporation as naturally and automatically as our organs do. This deflects accountability away from individuals who may or may not have real power within the corporation to the abstraction of the corporation itself. - Corporations have bodily needs (like eating and breathing) that must be met in order to survive.
If corporations have bodies, then they also have bodily needs. As economic entities created under capitalism, corporations “need” to make a profit. Without profit, the corporation dies. As the corporation grows, more profit is needed (as well as more resources and labor to make that profit), just as more (calories, water, etc.) is needed to maintain a growing body. Somewhat mysteriously though, the corporate body is not subject to the same life cycle as the human one. It is in a perpetual state of youth, growing steadily or in spurts, but always growing. - Corporations have agency and, in a free and democratic society, have the right to exercise that agency. This one is the core of the legal corporate personhood metaphor. As a person, and not just any bodied being, the corporation has a capacity to make decisions, set goals, and pursue the fulfillment of those goals. Existing within a legal system that ensures these capacities as rights, corporations are, literally, afforded the “same” rights — rights, not only to survival, but to the pursuit of happiness. In doing so, we’re put in the awkward position of extending person-like rights to corporate-like actions. Freedom of speech is perhaps the most infamous here — without a literal ability to speak or independently express itself via language, what counts as a corporation’s self-expression? Spending vast amounts of money, apparently.2
- Corporations act according to an agreed upon set of values. Like people, the corporate body does not exist in isolation. It interacts with other “individuals” and with systems. In these interactions, the corporation is expected to act according to a set of rules. For people, this involves a complex network of intertwined and sometimes contradictory rule sets, from the interpersonal, to the religious, to the legal. Corporations seem to escape this complexity by literally being a part of our economic system. As literal economic entities, their literal obligation to abide by economic rules trumps the metaphoric obligations we may attempt to place on them to also follow, for example, moral ones.
The point here is to show that when we break down the corporate personhood metaphor like this, things get strange. The lifecycle is all wrong. I’m hard-pressed to find corporate equivalents of emotions or perception. I have no idea what it would mean for a corporation to play. The friendships and marriages of a corporation are contractual and transactional. We cannot hold them to the same ethical standards, and cannot reason with them about adopting different beliefs.
And still the metaphor persists.
When I talk about bi-directionality in metaphor, it is usually out of concern for this kind of persistent incompatibility. If we accept corporations as people, metaphorically and legally, then what does that mean for our understanding of people? Are the incompatibilities accepted and stable, or, with each use, do our definitions shift to release a bit of conceptual tension? If we accept profit as necessary for the “survival” of corporations, why not also prioritize the pursuit of profit for real-life individuals? If economic logics can trump socially responsible ones for corporations, why not also for people? And if all “interpersonal” relations for corporations can be reduced to transactional ones, why not do the same for our relationships with each other?
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[1] Quick reminder: what we are mainly concerned with is shifting and contested folk understandings. Specialist definitions may be helpful for critique, but are less relevant for understanding how metaphor works in the every day.
[2] For a critique of this extension see: Hellman, D. (2010). Money talks but it isn't speech. Minn. L. Rev., 95, 953.
