Guilty of My Own Sin

So, just days after I write a post titled The Anthropomorphization of Business, I get a paper back that I’d written a couple days previously, regarding the Alcoa corporation. Sure enough, smack dab in the middle of the brief document that I wrote lies the statement “… Alcoa cares …” Now, mind you, I don’t fundamentally believe that Alcoa cares. It was another essay due by another business teacher about companies and the vague notion of Corporate Social Responsibility, or as I like to call it - shifted responsibility. The government is impotent and the people it represents are lethargic and apathetic. Our society has now shifted the burden of “social responsibility” to the realm of corporations - who don’t answer to “society” any more than their shareholders and customers demand they do.

Not only did I get an ‘A’ on this paper, but throughout the article I wrote a couple citations that had to do with the concept of Alcoa as a thinking, feeling, and interacting thing. The teacher never called me out on any of it. In contemporary business culture, businesses are people. The businessman in me is fine with the concept - protect my organization the same as I would protect a friend or fellow citizen. But the citizen in me, the libertarian in me, notices how relevant Reich’s discussion point is (and how astounded I am that this is the first encounter with this issue I’ve had).

Sure enough, Alcoa is a thing. But it’s not a person, it’s just a legal agreement. Along similar thinking we’ve bastardized copyright’s intentions through the Disney clause. Walt invented the lovable character of Mickey Mouse, but the Disney Corporation has managed to pervert the intention of copyright (to help individuals protect their intellectual property) and instead uses it as a shield against competition.

For those that haven’t gotten the chance to read Robert Reich’s engaging Supercapitalism, I wanted to provide a quick excerpt that really highlights the “ah HA!” moment that I got from this book…

A final truth that needs to be emphasized - the most basic of all - is that corporations are not people. They are legal fictions, nothing more than bundles of contractual agreements. Yes, there are “corporate cultures,” dominant styles or norms such as characterize any group. . .

. . . Corporations should have no more legal rights to free speech, due process, or political representation in a democracy than do any other pieces of paper on which contracts are written. . . Only people should posses such rights.

. . . the public is misled into thinking companies resemble people. Even the grammatical convention in America of attaching verbs directly to a company - as in “Microsoft is trying to…” or “Wal-Mart wants…” - subtly reinforces the tendency to think about these entities as having independent volition.

Robert Reich - Supercapitalism - p216

This one section - near the very end of Supercapitalism, really drove home what Reich was getting at, and fortunately as a business student I can easily recognize that this indoctrination program in to the CSR mantras is enormous even in higher education. Future managers are being told that they should embrace “stakeholders,” but that opposes the fundamental foundation of business according to Milton Friedman that “the business of business is business,” and that delivering a good product and a reasonable investment return is the cause of businesses.

Anyways, I am going to make it my personal mission the rest of my time here at SJSU to focus on clarifying my choice of language. I have no doubt that within the Alcoa organization, there are tens of thousands of people that care. But the organization - the legal framework that holds these employees and assets and ownership rights together - is in the business of creating aluminum and growing the value of the organization and the subsequent share price.