Re-bunking corporate agency

ABSTRACT

My aim in this article is to rescue the holist position on corporate agency (CA) from indignities heaped upon it by friends and enemies alike. Two general criticisms strike at the core of the position: the charge of ‘material failures’ (that the corporate agent lacks a proper material presence) and the charge of illusion (that the intentionality of the corporate agent consists in the intentionality of the members). Both attack the holist position on metaphysical grounds, logically prior to any claims of agency; if these charges cannot be answered then much of the CA literature collapses.

The article begins by outlining the criticisms and a holist account of corporate agents that incorporates and transcends earlier offerings on corporate agency from French, List and Pettit, and others. It then addresses the charge of material failures, demonstrating that the holist corporate agent is a material entity (nothing ‘ghostly,’) and arguing that neither its scattered nature nor its dependency on voluntary participation undermines that status. It closes by addressing the charge of illusion, demonstrating that the common charge of double-counting member intentionality is false. Both charges arise from the same misreading of the holist position, which ignores the metaphysics of the corporate agent.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• corporate agency
• holist
• intentionality
• material objects
• metaphysics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The label of ‘holist’ is mine, and none of the scholars identified as such in this paragraph has (to my knowledge) taken the label for themself. These scholars affirm the commitments I’ve attributed to them here, but none has addressed the metaphysical implications of the accounts they’ve put forward. See French (1984) and List and Pettit (2011) for the primary treatments; for other holist treatments in the philosophical literature see Björnsson and Hess (2017), Copp (1979, 1984), Hess (2014a, 2014b), Isaacs (2011), Tollefsen (2015). For parallel treatments in the law and economics literature, see Orts (2013) and Singer (2019).

2 The quoted words come respectively from Velasquez (2003), Rönnegard (2015), Rönnegard and Velasquez (2017), an irate participant at the Annual Meeting of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society (2018), Miller and Makela (2005), and Ludwig (2017).

3 See e.g. Haslanger (2016), Thomasson (2016) for an entry point.

4 See e.g. Ritchie (2013), Epstein (2015) for an entry point.

5 See Hess 2020 for more on the significance of this distinction between accounts of corporate agents and of corporate agency. Among other things, accounts of agency do not address the limits or characteristics of the agent beyond its agency (does it include all of the members? artifacts? is it limited to members despite depending on non-agents for its intentionality? what other capacities does it have?), nor the essential question of what unifies these pieces into a single robust entity. How we answer these questions has significant implications for how we understand the agency itself as well as the moral responsibility of both the corporate agent and its members. Understanding the robust existence of the agent itself, supported by far more than just those aspects of the agent that contribute to its agency, also provides a radically stronger base for corporate autonomy than critics often assume.

6 I’ve focused on Manuel Velasquez’ (1983, 2003), David Rönnegard’s (2013, 2015), and Rönnegard and Velasquez’s (2017) criticisms because I find them the most well-developed and informative, and because they are generally representative of criticisms and concerns less aptly stated elsewhere. Similar claims, interpretations, and assumptions can be found in the work of other critics, e.g. Wall (2000), Miller and Makela (2005), Ludwig (2017). None of the critics have explained what it is about corporate agents that is ghostly, incorporeal, mysterious, magical, spooky, hovering etc. I have interpreted this as a concern about immateriality, but there are other possibilities.

7 Supervenience addresses the relationship between a subvenient base and supervenient facts, properties, and capacities; it does not address relationships between material objects. To the extent that prior discussions of the corporate agent itself (rather than its properties or capacities) were carried out in terms of supervenience, this entailed treating the corporate agent as immaterial.

8 Among other things, in (2003) he acknowledges that groups are ‘real’ and that their existence ‘requires also that there exist certain relationships and properties linking its members to each other that set these members off from their larger environment’ (553 n. 20). In (1983) he recognizes that corporate acts are distinct from the acts of individual members, noting that ‘a corporate act is an effect brought about by or constituted by the voluntary bodily movements of corporate members (or the omissions of such movements) who are related in a certain way and who act against a background system of constitutive rules’ (18 n 11).

9 Velasquez makes this point in arguing that corporate agents lack a ‘unity of mind and physical instrumentality’ (1983, 9; generally 4, 8-9). Rönnegard develops this criticism more fully by suggesting and then rejecting the possibility that member behaviours can be properly understood as the ‘vicarious actions’ of the corporate agent (under various theories of vicarious responsibility) (31-48). He considers whether the member behaviours can somehow be secondarily ascribed to the (separate, immaterial) entity that he takes to be the corporate agent, but doesn’t consider the possibility that the member behaviours (coordinated and integrated by the corporate structures) are the actions of the corporate agent.

10 Copp (1984) is a notable exception. Others have explored the metaphysics of corporate agency – McMahon (1995) is an excellent example – but many of these earlier treatments were caught up in the then-dominant theory of supervenience. Again (n. 7), this is inconsistent with the materiality of the corporate agent.

11 See Hess 2014b and further sources cited therein. Note that claiming that corporate agents have beliefs, desires, and other intentional states is not necessarily equivalent to claiming that corporate agents have minds. For many scholars, ‘mindedness’ entails phenomenal consciousness or the experience of qualia, and my corporate agents are capable of neither (though see Schwitzgebel 2015). See n. 20 for further discussion.

12 Compare to Singer’s description of how corporations rely on ‘cognitive scripts’ (2019, 128–35). Cognitive scripts are ‘schemas for behavior, or for understanding events or behaviors’ … [which] structure the way in which people process and engage with the world around them … . [T]his sociological view focuses on how notions of legitimacy, expectation, and socialization are used to coordinate individuals in groups, often without those individuals being aware’ (129; quoting Gioia and Poole 1984, 450).

13 See Amis, Mair, and Munir (2020) for a fascinating overview of the ways standard business practices around hiring, role allocation, promotion, compensation, and structuring subtly contribute to numerous social inequalities.

14 Haslanger is concerned with the nature and role of such structures in the broader society. It is my suggestion that we find similar structures playing similar roles – albeit with significantly different commitments – within individual organisations. Haslanger does not claim any metaphysical implications for her structures.

15 See Hess 2018b, 2018c for a comparison of telelogical and holist approaches. I take the descriptor ‘teleological’ from Collins (2019) to designate groups defined and unified shared intentions, variously understood; in my previous work I have referred to such groups as ‘collectivist.’

16 See Hess 2020 for an extended comparison of these three accounts.

17 This premise simply notes that people are a necessary part of any collective; as noted in the text, it does not suggest that they are sufficient.

18 The terms of this argument are intentionally broad and non-committal regarding the precise sense in which collectives are ‘made of’ people and the precise nature of ‘people’ (or persons). It is a strength of my account that both the ‘body’ and the intentionality of the corporate agent described here are consistent with most of the accounts thus far developed to address matters of ontological dependence and agency (see Hess 2014b, 2020), and I avoid unnecessary commitments on these topics. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

19 I use ‘parts’ in a colloquial sense here, making no commitments about whether the members qualify as mereological parts.

20 This raises the question of what Rönnegard and Velasquez think they are rejecting when they reject corporate agents and agency. One possibility is that they think that there is supposed to be something more to the corporate agent than they have attributed to their organisations, perhaps reading the holists as dualists committed to a separate ‘mental part.’ In that case, they have simply misunderstood what has been claimed regarding the agent itself. The second possibility – which seems more likely – is that they disagree that the entity so described qualifies as an intentional agent, perhaps because intentionality or agency requires phenomenal consciousness. In that case the criticism falls outside the scope of this paper, which is concerned with the agent (the entity) rather than its agency (its capacities). See n. 24 for further discussion. I thank the editors for pressing me on this point.

21 The phrase is from Cartwright (1975); Van Inwagen (1995) introduced the SCQ.

22 Hess 2018b provides an extended development of Baker 2000 and Van Inwagen 1995 with respect to corporate agents. For general answers to the SCQ see Baker (2000) and Markosian (1998, 2000); for ‘social’ treatments, see Campbell (1958), Quinton (1975), Van Inwagen (1995, 84–86), Uzquiano (2004), and Korman (2015).

23 My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

24 There is a second argument for the charge of illusion, namely that ‘real’ agency require phenomenal consciousness and corporate agents are not phenomenally conscious. Space limitations prevent me from addressing this fifth concern here, but it is addressed briefly in Björnsson and Hess 2017 and at more length in Hess 2018a.

25 This is the insight that seems to be missing from Ludwig 2017 (s. 8.3), when he assumes that his elaborate, detailed account of member behaviour somehow precludes the possibility of corporate behaviour rather than simply explaining it.

26 Other powers and potentials derive from legal status (whatever it might be), historical relationships with other agents (corporate and otherwise), held real and personal property, reputation, and the like.

27 Contrast this with the case of ‘a green thing made out of green things,’ where the green of the composite thing really is just the green of the components. Although, contrast that with the case of a composite green thing made out of green components of a variety of shades; in this latter case, it seems that the composite might have its own shade of green that is not simply a ‘sum total’ of the greens of its parts.