Refraiming Corporate Purpose: A Historical Perspective
Abstract
This research examines the historical evolution of corporate purpose and the legal mechanisms affecting corporate charters. Drawing upon UK royal charters and utilizing textual analysis, the study reveals that corporate charters were issued to fulfill some public-oriented purpose. The analysis shows that such conception of corporate purpose was enforced. Employing the case study of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the research demonstrates that charter revocations historically stemmed from corporate activities exceeding specified purposes. Contrary to prevalent contemporary discourse emphasizing corporate purpose as a broad goal, this study highlights the importance of law in ensuring a commitment to a limited, well-defined corporate purpose. Ultimately, this research contributes to a nuanced understanding of corporate purpose, highlighting its historical roots and its implications for contemporary corporate governance and legal practices
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.