Governing the Corpopolis: Modern Organizations as Political Communities

Kendy Hess (College of the Holy Cross)

The Collective Ethics Seminar: Online Presentation – 9 December 2024 – 15.15 – 16.45 CET / 09.15 – 10.45 EST.

Kendy Hess (College of the Holy Cross) – Governing the Corpopolis: Modern Organizations as Political Communities

On Monday 9 December 2024, Kendy Hess will give an online presentation at the Collective Ethics Seminar entitled “Governing the Corpopolis: Modern Organizations as Political Communities”.

Abstract: Scholars working in the collective literatures have spent a great deal of time talking about large, highly organized groups. We often rather carelessly call them corporations (a particularly problematic usage) but also firms, institutions, organizations, and so forth; within the literature, if not within the work of particular scholars, the terms are often used interchangeably. Much (most?) of this work has focused on the supervenient patterns discernible in such groups and on the various mechanisms that generate those patterns. This is certainly true of my own work, and also of French, Gilbert, Miller, List and Pettit, Isaacs, Collins, Bratman, and so on. In this paper I suggest that we’ve all missed an extraordinarily important aspect of these groups. This is particularly embarrassing for me, because it’s my own account that makes it the most obvious.

I begin with a quick review of my own holist, structuralist account of corporate agents (v. agency). I’ve argued elsewhere that the groups who meet my criteria for corporate agents qualify as moral agents, but here I argue that any group meeting these criteria will also (likely? necessarily?) qualify as a political community. To that end, I will present a novel, Aristotelian account of political community and then work through the symmetries between my corporate agents and these Aristotelian groups. I will close by briefly sketching some of the implications.

The online seminar is open for all to attend. The session starts at 15.15 CET / 09.15 EST. You can join the session via the following link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/62736288881?pwd=SndEdTNoNlZtSzJqcmpabm5NaWIyUT09

For more information about the seminar, please see https://social.univie.ac.at/events/collective-ethics-seminar/.

We hope to see you at the seminar!

Kind regards,

Gunnar Björnsson (Stockholm University), Olle Blomberg (University of Gothenburg), and Niels de Haan (University of Vienna)