Kicking the black box around: A review of “The Corporation"

Many organization scholars have a standard refrain of criticizing economists for treating the firm as a black box, never looking inside it. "The Corporation" is a provocative, enlightening, and entertaining film that makes people stop and examine this black box they generally take for granted. It meticulously, often melodramatically, but rarely impartially points out the social and environmental harms that accompany the operation of this black box. The film, through its editing and tone, belittles the well-established economic doctrine of resolving common problems by privatizing them. This doctrine may largely hold true on an individual ownership basis, but the film strongly implies that it does not hold true when the private owner is a corporation. People at least need to convince corporations to be more and more benevolent by demonstrating to them how benevolence can be in their own best interests, and how some of those things that corporations treat as externalities are internalized in the long run