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Record W3122116838

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

2004· article· en· W3122116838 on OpenAlexaffabout
Joel Bakan

Bibliographic record

VenueSSRN Electronic Journal · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicCorporate Law and Human Rights
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCorporationShareholderPower (physics)PremiseLawInstitutionDemocracyCorporate lawPolitical scienceEconomic powerLaw and economicsSociologyManagementCorporate governanceEconomicsPolitics
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

As incisive as Eric Schlosser's bestselling Fast Food Nation, as rigorous as Joseph E. Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents, and as scathing as Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, Joel Bakan's new book is a brilliantly argued account of the corporation's pathological pursuit of profit and power. An eminent law professor and legal theorist, Bakan contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. In the most revolutionary assessment of the corporation as a legal and economic institution since Peter Drucker's early works, Bakan backs his premise with the following claims: • The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others—a concept endorsed by no less a luminary than the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. • The corporation's unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. • While corporate social responsibility in some instances does much good, it is often merely a token gesture, serving to mask the corporation's true character. • Governments have abdicated much of their control over the corporation, despite its flawed character, by freeing it from legal constraints through deregulation and by granting it ever greater authority over society through privatization. Despite the structural failings found in the corporation, Bakan believes change is possible and outlines a far-reaching program of concrete, pragmatic, and realistic reforms through legal regulation and democratic control. Backed by extensive research, The Corporation draws on in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as CEO Hank McKinnell of Pfizer, Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and critic Noam Chomsky of MIT. [From Corporation by Joel Bakan | Penguin Random House Canada]

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.041

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.031
Scholarly communication0.0160.008
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0030.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.198
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations709
Published2004
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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