Firms as Political Entities: Diagnosis and Prospects

As the world becomes more and more automated, it is becoming increasingly important to describe and define the institution within which workers as humans actually experience it. If we want the firm's institutional reality to fit the context and constraints of a democratic society, we must question the very nature of the power structure that has been entrusted with the responsibility of governing work and, by extension, the responsibility of legitimately governing (or not governing) the capitalist firm. As we shall see, the firm is the institution that best embodies the contradictions and tensions between capitalism and democracy. In order to address this, we shall look at past institutional innovations in the field of corporate governance through the lens of the history of Western political democratization. We shall then identify a way forward by moving from capital monocameralism to bicameralism, at last recognizing the same rights for labor investors as those already granted to capital investors. This lecture draws on Isabelle Ferreras publications, Governing the Capitalist Firm and Gouverner le capitalisme