ALTERNATIVES TO THE CORPORATION
Saturday, Aug 2, 2014, 12:30PM - 3:30PM at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Room 120 A
NOTE: preregistration is required
Organizers: Paul Adler (USC) and Jerry Davis (Michigan)
Cosponsored by OMT, BPS, CMS, ONE
The goal of this PDW is to build on the enthusiasm created around the 2013 All-Academy Theme (“Capitalism in question”), by consolidating a community of scholars working together to advance research on alternative economic futures. This PDW will focus attention on alternatives to the corporation. The corporation is the modal organizational form of economic activity in contemporary capitalism, and in recent decades, this form has come under increasing criticism. A growing number of scholars are responding to this changing context, undertaking research that explores alternatives to the corporation: their research covers a broad territory, from the relatively micro arena of social innovation to the relatively macro arena of comparative political-economy. This highly interactive workshop will alternate panel presentations and small-group discussions on each of three themes in turn:
(a) alternative organizational goals:
• Lynn Stout (Cornell Law School): Can recognizing the diversity of interests among shareholders allow us to get beyond a unidimensional concept of maximizing share price as the goal of the corporation?
• Jim Walsh (Michigan): Do efforts at social responsibility by public corporations actually yield benefits beyond PR?
• Charles Heckscher (Rutgers): How does the stakeholder movement, as embodied in the B Corporation, reflect value rationality as a post-modern concept?
(b) alternative organizational forms:
• Ted Hall (Shopbot Tools Inc.): How do new digital tools such as low-cost computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines enable new forms of organization and distributed production?
• Joseph Blasi (Rutgers): How can new efforts at worker ownership enable the “property-owning democracy” envisioned by political thinkers since the founding of the American republic?
• Anna Grandori (Bocconi): What can we learn from the alternative organizational and governance arrangements present in human capital based innovative entrepreneurial firms?
(c) alternative institutional enablers:
• Peer Hull Kristensen (Copehagen): How can we reconcile “flexicurity” systems, such as the one in Denmark, with globalization and the increasingly multinational span of enterprises?
• Nick Iuviene (MIT): What role can leadership development play in changing the institutional context of local economies to enable multi-stakeholder coordination?
• Erik Wright (Wisconsin): How can we link alternatives to the corporation to a broader agenda of social transformation that advances values of social justice, democracy, community and sustainability?
More information is available at:
http://program.aomonline.org/2014/Session_Details.asp?print=true&SubmissionID=10617
PDW Preregistration at:
http://aom.org/annualmeeting/registration/pdw/