Who are the owners of the firm: shareholders, employees or no one?

Abstract

The issue of firm ownership is an ongoing debate. For several decades, contractarian theory has undoubtedly shaped the academic debate in both law and economics. Proponents of this approach suggest that shareholders can legitimately be considered the owners of a firm because they hold shares. This approach, though attractive, is legally incorrect. Legal scholars have noted that a corporation cannot legally belong to shareholders or other stakeholders; no one owns the firm (and a corporation). The question of firm ownership masks the following crucial issue: Who should govern the firm? In this article, after returning to the theoretical debate on firm ownership and explaining why a firm cannot be owned, we shall analyze power as the core of firm governance. This approach is a potentially relevant and accurate way to address the problems of specific human investment, collective creation and productive (consummate) cooperation in modern firms. *

Reexamining the Cost of Corporate Criminal Prosecutions

“…Such a reality would explain why corporate crime persists despite sanctions that now regularly exceed the gross domestic products of small nations. Third, showing that shareholders bear the bulk, if not all, of the costs for criminal convictions supports the shareholder primacy view in agency theory (Campbell et al, 2012) rather than alternative views (Chassagnon & Hollandts, 2014). In this regard, the present research also makes a step towards resolving longstanding debates among legal scholars regarding the normative validity of prosecuting firm owners instead of or in addition to their malfeasant agents (Arlen, 1994;O'Leary, 2007).…”

Mediated ownership: capital as media

“…Another view, less inclined to reduce all collective activity to entanglements of individuals, regards the firm as a more sui generis creature with a life of its own. Chassagnon and Hollandts (2014) contend that the firm cannot in fact be owned at all, for it is a "politico-legal entity," a "social organization that is institutionalized separately from law." Shareholders may be said to own shares, perhaps, and shares engender certain rights over the corporation, but those rights are fewer than those that comprise classical accounts of property (e.g., Honoré, 1961).…”

Innovation in Stra. Tech. Man (Strategy-Technology-Management) Terms

“…And it becomes progressively understood that the modern economic and organizational thinking and science has a lot to gain from a theoretical refocusing, centered on the evolutionary dynamics of the capitalist enterprise (Alchian, 1953;Aoki, 2007;Augier, & Teece, 2008;Chassagnon, 2011a;Chassagnon, & Hollandts, 2014;Coriat, 1995;Coriat, & Weinstein, 2010;Mäki, 2004).…”