Corporations have always fascinated me. From dinner table conversations where my father inveighed against the foolish superiors with whom he dealt at work, to a college job working on an overly ambitious business ethics training program in one of the world’s largest private companies, to learning the ropes (and quickly becoming disillusioned with) a sales position at a consumer products company after completing my undergraduate degree, to hearing decades of university students’ impressions of corporations as necessary but toxic actors, to public debates about corporate personhood, corporations have always been curious and frustrating creations. Not only are they the screens upon which a wide array of hopes and dreams are projected (my own included), but they also often appear, at least in the popular consciousness, as unitary entities with well-defined interests. Across those many experiences with corporations, I gradually came to understand that, like all organizations, they are significantly messier and less predictable than we participants and observers would like to admit. And in that complexity we can find something captivating.
The title What Do Corporations Want? is intended to be provocative in its deceptive simplicity. As I’ve had conversations about this book with colleagues, friends, and family, they tell me the answer to the title’s question is simple: corporations want profits. End of story. (That’s usually followed by a joke about how short a book this’ll be.) Obviously, that’s not wrong, but I’d suggest – keeping with the preceding paragraph – that answering the question is significantly more complex (and interesting) than it might at first appear.
This book engages with that complexity, but its message is relatively simple: the phase of capitalism in which we find ourselves – what I’ll call ‘communicative capitalism’ in Chapter 1 – makes corporations want (makes them pursue purpose) in ways that interfere with new ‘becomings.’ In other words, corporations’ efforts to organize to meet the demands of a new form of capitalism produce dis/organizational consequences that threaten their capacities to shift and grow in directions that serve the purposes they purport to desire. I then argue that the book’s central theoretical contribution, a Communicative Theory of the Firm, provides a resource to make sense
Developing a new theory of the firm for a new capitalist order is not, in itself, a good thing. But because corporations are some of the most prominent and influential actors on our socioeconomic scene, we’d better understand what (and how) they want. And as I mention in the Introduction, unless we can answer those questions, we can’t grasp the issue of whether those wants are worthwhile. So, while the book addresses the conventional themes encountered by theories of the firm well-known in strategic management and managerial economics, it moves beyond those to address more thorny issues associated with organizing as well.
Getting there, however, will require a mode of interrogation that may appear peculiar, perhaps even abstruse. I’ll present the central notion, communication, in a light that violates many taken-for-granteds in its encounter with Communicative Constitution of Organization and new materialist thinking. But I hope to show that the payoff is worth the effort.