Citizenship and the Corporation

Abstract

This article investigates the contribution made by the concept of citizenship to contemporary understandings of the widely held business corporation. Because the conventional economic understanding of corporations and corporate law cannot fully explain the nature of the business corporation and the purposes of corporate law, the framework within which teachers and students of corporate law approach the corporation must be enlarged. By looking at the corporation exclusively through the lens of economics we are unable to account for all features of the corporation and corporate law, and we risk mistaking the purpose of these features, or wrongly supposing that they serve no purpose. The article proposes that through resort to a distinct set of conceptual tools—the concept of citizenship, borrowed from political theory—we can attain a fuller comprehension of the meaning of the corporation.

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