The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation

The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation assesses the contemporary relevance, purpose, and performance of the corporation. The corporation is one of the most significant, if contested, innovations in human history, and the direction and effectiveness of corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate performance are being challenged as never before. Continuously evolving, the corporation as the primary instrument for wealth generation in contemporary economies demands frequent assessment and reinterpretation.

The focus of this work is the transformative impact of innovation and change upon corporate structure, purpose, and operation. Corporate innovation is at the heart of the value-creation process in increasingly internationalized and competitive market economies, and corporations today are embedded in a world of complex global supply chains and rising state and state-directed capitalism. In questioning the fundamental purpose and performance of the corporation, this Handbook continues a tradition commenced by Berle and Means, and contributed to by generations of business scholars. What is the corporation and what is it becoming? How do we define its form and purpose and how are these changing? To whom is the corporation responsible, and who should judge the ultimate performance of corporations? By investigating the origins, development, strategies, and theories of corporations, this volume addresses such questions to provide a richer theoretical account of the corporation and its contested future.

Thomas Clarke, Professor of Corporate Governance, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney,Justin O'Brien, Professor of Financial Regulation, Monash Business School, Monash University,Charles O'Kelley, Director, Adolf A. Berle Jr Center on Corporations, Law and Society, Seattle University School of Law, Seattle University

Thomas Clarke is Professor of Corporate Governance at the University of Technology Sydney. He is the Editor of the Elements in Corporate Governance series (Cambridge University Press) and the Inaugural Sir Adrian Cadbury Scholar of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN). He has published over 30 authored/edited books, including Innovation in the Asia Pacific: From Manufacturing to Knowledge Economies (Springer 2018); International Corporate Governance (Routledge second edition 2017); and the Sage Handbook of Corporate Governance (2012), together with 200 refereed articles and book chapters.


Justin O'Brien is Professor of Financial Regulation and a senior fellow at the Australian Centre for Financial Studies at Monash Business School, Monash University. He is the General Editor of Law and Financial Markets Review (Taylor and Francis). He is the author and editor of a series of books on the dynamics of financial regulation with particular reference to capital market governance, including, with Iain G. MacNeil, The Future of Financial Regulation (Hart 2010), and with George Gilligan, Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture (Hart 2013). Prior to taking up a career in academia Professor O'Brien was a journalist and editor with the British Broadcasting Corporation and Ulster Television.


Charles R. T. O'Kelley is Director of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society of Seattle University School of Law. He is an expert in corporate governance and Delaware corporation law. Charles is the author, with Robert B. Thompson, of one of the most widely used casebooks in the field of corporation law, Corporations and Other Business Associations (Wolters Kluwer seventh edition 2014). On behalf of the Berle Centre he has organised a series of international inter-disciplinary Berle Symposium's on the nature of the modern corporation. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association.

1. The Evolving Corporation: Economy, Law, and Society, Thomas Clarke and Justin O'Brien
I: Genesis of the Corporation
2. The Dutch East India Company: The First Corporate Governance Debacle, Paul Frentrop
3. The English East India Company-State and the Modern Corporation: The Google of its Time?, Philip J. Stern
4. Socialising Capital: The Rise of the Industrial Corporation, William G. Roy
II: Corporate Purposes and Accountability
5. From Berle to the Present: The Shifting Primacies of Corporation Theory, Charles R. T. O'Kelley
6. Understanding the Roots of Shareholder Primacy: The Meaning of Agency Theory, and the Conditions of its Contagion, Olivier Weinstein
III: Theories of the Firm
7. Corporate Purpose: Legal Interpretations and Empirical Evidence, Shelley Marshall and Ian Ramsay
8. Corporate Law as a Solution to Team Production Problems, Margaret M. Blair
9. Corporations as Sempiternal Legal Persons, Lynn Stout
IV: Political Theory of the Corporation
10. Finance Capitalism, the Financialised Corporation, and Countervailing Power, John W. Cioffi
11. The Neoliberal Corporation, David Ciepley
12. Theorizing the Corporation: Liberal, Confucian and Socialist Perspectives, Teemu Ruskola
V: Strategies of Contemporary Corporations
13. Global Corporations and Global Value Chains: The Disaggregation of Corporations?, Thomas Clarke and Martijn Boersma
14. Growth Strategies of the New Multinationals, Mauro F. Guillen and Esteban Garcia-Canal
VI: Diversity of Institutions and Corporations
15. Corporations, Organisation, and Human Action: An Anthropological Critique of Agency Theory, Jean-Francois Chanlat
16. The Japanese Corporation: Community, Purpose, and Strategy, Takaya Seki
VII: The Innovative Corporation
17. Dynamic Capabilities, the Multinational Corporation, and Capturing Co-created Value from Innovation, Christos N. Pitelis and David J. Teece
18. The Theory of Innovative Enterprise: Foundations of Economic Analysis, William Lazonick
19. Corporations in the Clouds? The Transformation of the Corporation in an Era of Disruptive Innovations, Danielle M. Logue
VIII: The Responsible Corporation
20. The Changing Nature of the Corporation and the Economic Theory of the Firm, Nicolai Foss and Stefan Linder
21. Corporate Responsibility and the Embedded Firm: A Critical Reappraisal, Cynthia A. Williams
IX: The Sustainable Corporation
22. The Greening of the Corporation, Thomas Clarke
23. Corporate Sustainability in a Fragile Planet, Suzanne Benn and Melissa Edwards
X: The Future of the Corporation
24. Transcending the Corporation: Social Enterprise, Cooperatives and Commons-Based Governance, Bronwen Morgan
25. The Evolution of Corporate Form: From Shareholders' Property to the Corporation as Commons, Simon Deakin