Chapter 12: Humanizing Corporations and Socializing their Responsibilities: The Challenge for Business Schools

It may seem curious to the modern reader, but the corporation and the university (L. universitas = all converted into one) evolved from the same innovative creation of Roman law that seems to have taken place two millennia ago and which was subsequently refined by medieval ecclesiastical courts. This legal innovation created new “beings”—not persons as such, but rather personas (L. theatrical masks)—that had independent legal standing, perpetual existence, and the ability to shield the property and wealth of those natural persons who formed them.

It was a radical and ingenious innovation that served corporate entities and their owners very well. But even as they were being created, there must have been some concern about bringing nonhuman entities into society— exactly the same as the contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence, robots, and cyborgs (Lin, Abney, & Bekey, 2014). Historically, the social behavior of corporations—and of universities and particularly of business schools—has often been worrying and problematic. It has been inwardlooking, self-referent, and detached from the concerns of the broader human world within which these entities are situated. Indeed, given their nonhuman and consequently nonsocial nature, it seems inevitable that a construct such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) should have a hollow ring in both the firm and the business school, and might easily be taken for an irrelevancy or an oxymoron.