Capitalism and the Corporation: The Contemporary Business Case Study

Capitalism and the Corporation:

The contemporary business corporation is an initial creation of the United States imagination that was originally designed to expand local markets. The initial design soon became an essential means to develop a national market. As a result, the American industrialization and capitalism were critically dependent on the corporate form of organization. However, the corporation was not an intangible original initiative since it spread in reaction to tangible economic challenges. Moreover, the corporation had first to become a legal technique before it developed into anything else. Therefore, corporate law is not a division of higher mathematics whose cogency needs a series of more elementary operations since external forces like economic pressures helped to create the corporation. The problem under investigation is the history of the corporation in light of its origin and development. The other issues examined in the article include the different definitions of stakeholder, differences in management philosophies, and views of stakeholders.

Existence of Corporations:

According to capitalism, a corporation is described as a group of people organized in a particular legitimate form similar to the way a society is primarily a combination of individuals organized in a specific form ("Corporation," n.d.). Furthermore, capitalism denotes that corporations are products of a particular contractual legal framework offered by the government and dependent on the principle of rights of individuals. Therefore, the existence of corporations is dependent on individual rights and governments to safeguard these individual rights.

Novak states that corporations have existed for a long period of time i.e. forever since they started in the middle ages as burial societies. The existence of these corporations then proceeded to monasteries, towns, and universities.While the existence of corporations cannot be referred to a certain date and time, they have existed for several centuries (Shah, 2002). Actually, survival in the corporate world can be traced back to the founding generations of fishermen and farmers, land owners, and churchmen (Jennings, 2012, p.105).

Corporation in the United States vs. Britain and Europe:

Corporations in the United States have some fundamental differences with those in Britain and Europe thought the differences are not easy to identify (Hassan, 2012). The main difference in corporations between the two regions is attributed to the rate with which the corporations developed within the two jurisdictions. As compared to Britain and Europe, the United States experienced a rapid growth of corporations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast, Britain and the whole European continent experienced a slow rate of growth in terms of corporations. As the United States started a new era of a sovereign nation, it had more corporations than Britain and European continent combined. One of the major reasons for the rapid growth of corporations in the United States is the freedom and liberty enjoyed by American citizens that contributed to creativity and growth of corporation.

Definitions of Stakeholders:

Corporations have stakeholders who are described as individuals and/or groups that benefit from and are hurt by corporate actions (Jennings, 2009, p.82). The likelihood of corporate stakeholders to benefit or suffer from corporate actions is dependent on the ability of the corporation to respect or violate their rights respectively. There are two major definitions of stakeholders i.e. The….....