Inequality, Inc

To engage with inequality, I explore how corporate governance theory is based on inherently contingent ideas of the legal and organizational structuring of the modern public corporation in a corporate ‘architecture’, and how these contingent ideas affect the distribution of privileges, protections and proceeds to different types of actors. I argue that the currently dominant corporate governance theory ignores a specific corporate architecture that provided internal and external legitimacy to the modern public corporation by embedding a set of trade-offs between constituent groups and cementing those trade-offs into a broader institutional setting. Ignoring this architecture leads to the redirection of the privileges and protections embodied in the modern corporation to the exclusive benefit of an implicit coalition of market value-oriented shareholders and managers, while the risks to all other actors, interests and timeframes are relegated to the status of ‘externalities’. I explore how a focus on contingent conceptions of the modern corporation and of corporate governance provides an organizational-level explanation for growing inequality with which existing sectoral and state-centric approaches and means for engagement can be complemented.