Corporate Behaviour is the behaviour of a corporation or corporations.
The corporate behaviour exhibited by profit driven (capitalist) and not-for-profit (non-capitalist) corporations can be seen to differ significantly due to the fundamental drive for profit in capitalist corporations, compared to the non-monetary goals often held by non-capitalist corporations.
The Characteristics of Capitalist Corporate Behaviour
There are rules that capitalist profit making publicly-traded and privately-owned corporations must heed in order to survive. Not every capitalist corporation will abide by all the rules; however these rules can be seen to underpin the behaviour of all capitalist corporations.
The proposed rules of corporate behaviour are as follows[1]:
Profit: Profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. Corporations will even find ways to trade with national "enemies"—Libya, Iran, the former Soviet Union, Cuba—when public policy abhors it. The profit imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."
Growth: Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth, which is dependent upon relationships to investors, to the stock market, to banks and to public perception. The growth imperative also fuels the corporate desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world. Theoretically, privately held corporations—those owned by individuals or families—do not have the imperative to expand.
Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have moralsoraltruistic goals. So decisions that maybe antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. In fact, corporate executives praise "non-emotionality" as a basis for "objective" decision-making.
Hierarchy: Corporate laws require that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinated within a centralized pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, chief executive officer, vice presidents, division managers and so on.
Quantification, Linearity, Segmentation: Corporations require that subjective information be translated into objective form, i.e. numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of forests, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter corporate equations
Competition and Aggression: Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her ability to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another company or over a colleague within the company.
Dehumanization: People, both employees and customers, are seen as means not ends, providing a (replaceable) function for that corporation.
Exploitation: All corporate profit is obtained by a simple formula: Profit equals the difference between the amount paid to an employee and the economic value of the employee's output, and/or the difference between the amount paid for raw materials used in production (including costs of processing), and the ultimate sales price of processed raw materials.
Ephemerality: Corporations exist beyond time and space: they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbours; the traditional ideal of community engagement is antithetical to corporation behaviour.
Opposition to Nature: This mainly applies only to extractive and manufacturing corporations (as opposed to service corporations) whose entire purpose is the extraction, destruction and transformation of natural resources into other marketable goods.
Homogenization: Whilst corporations often claim to offer choice the product sales choices offered exist only within a rapidly homogenising national and now global market, attempting to create a single homogenised consumptive economy.
The Characteristics of Non-Capitalist Corporate Behaviour
As non-capitalist corporations such as NGO's or charities are not driven by the fundamentals of profit and economic growth, these do not show many of the characteristics of capitalist corporations. The behaviour of non-capitalist corporations is however often influenced by these characteristics of capitalist corporations, in similar ways to the influence of corporate behaviour on individuals. Due to this influence non-capitalist corporations can sometimes be seen to exhibit the characteristics of hierarchy, competition and ephemerality.
The Influence of Corporate Behaviour on Individuals & Society
Due to the dominance of capitalist corporations in Western societies the behaviour of corporations can be seen to have significant impacts on individuals and society. A person or group of people can have links to a corporation or corporations that range from weak to strong, if a person or group of people exhibit corporate behaviour that does not mean the person or group of people is employed by a corporation or corporations. A person or group of people may show corporate behaviour for different lengths of time, for some people they exhibit this behaviour at their place of work; for others it exhibited at work, home and outside the home. Many people display corporate behaviour but do not agree with actions and outcomes that result from it.
The fact that individuals may not agree with the outcomes of corporate behaviour is central to the concept in itself, the characteristics of capitalist corporations do not reflect the characteristics of any individual or group of individuals but are the characteristics required for the survival of capitalist corporations due to the nature of the system within which corporations operate.
References
Mander J (1991). In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. Sierra Club Books, San Fransisco.
