The hijacking of a new corporate form? Benefit corporations and corporate personhood

Abstract

Benefit corporations are a new type of corporate entity developed to remedy antisocial corporate behaviour by enabling mission-driven investors, managers and entrepreneurs to prioritize social values and contest the idea that profits are the only and best measure of corporate performance. To resocialize the corporate entity, the benefit corporation movement built enabling discourses and evaluation practices into the dominant model of corporate governance, shareholder value ideology. These discourses and practices expand both the purpose of the corporate entity and shareholders’ power to enforce that purpose. However, this paper argues that the effort to ‘re-embed’ the corporate entity by making it subject to non-economic claims expands the scope of corporate personhood and that doing so within extant power relations of the firm opens the door to alternative projects that undermine the benefit corporation movement's goal of fostering corporate social responsibility.

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