Imagining Corporate Personhood

Kirsch, Stuart

doi:10.1111/plar.12070

Cited by 34 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…This idea over time has come to exceed its legal definition. It is now “an effort to embed social or personal accountabilities within an otherwise diffuse organization or assemblage of persons and things” (Kirsch : 207–217] That is, corporate personhood as a concept refers to corporations’ attempts to represent complex social organizations as a single unity fashioned along the lines of a historically specific legal Euro‐American vision of an individual. It is thus a recursive movement across scale that occurs as personhood is transformed by the practices of a corporation into corporate personhood , and then turned into an aspirational project for individual job seekers.…”

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confidence: 99%

Selling Your Self in the United States

Gershon

2014

PoLAR

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In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person encounters adopting a form of corporate personhood? How does one foster relationships or networks that will lead to a job, not just a circulation of one's brand identity? Based on research in Indiana and northern California, this article explores the conundrums of marketing oneself as a desirable employee on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and so on. I address the reasons why the increased use of social media contributes to popularizing a notion of self‐branding. I also discuss the quandaries people face when using social media to create this self‐brand. In sum, this article investigates the obstacles people face when they try to embody a form of corporate personhood across media, a form of self putatively based on the individual, but one that has been transformed into a corporate form that people can not easily inhabit.

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confidence: 99%

Selling Your Self in the United States

Gershon

2014

PoLAR

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“…Adding to these voices are those of the tobacco corporations, the corporeal capitalist incarnations of their plant master who between them have carved up the world in a neo-colonial 'irresistible empire' (De Grazia, 2005). They are able to exert their overweening influence by acting like an individual at some times (Kirsch, 2014) and like a state at others (Russell et al, 2015). Could it be (we might speculate) that, through these means, far from following the thing, tobacco has actually been following us?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can the plant speak? Giving tobacco the voice it deserves

Russell

2018

Journal of Material Culture

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The idea of non-human objects speaking has an illustrious pedigree. Using Holbraad's (2011) question 'can the thing speak?' as a springboard, the author asks what it means to say that tobacco might speak. Accepting a degree of ventriloquism in giving a voice to plants, he tracks examples of tobacco (and its paraphernalia) speaking in English literary sources, demonstrating that the postmodern turn to 'material agency' and object sentiency, voice and intentionality is, in fact, nothing new. Taking Miller and Latour's conceptions of hybridity in human/non-human relationships seriously, he argues further that tobacco can speak, or remain silent, through a number of different human and corporate locutors. Where tobacco speaks in its own words, its voice -in contrast to the 'tinny but usable' voice of a mushroom spore -becomes that of an imperious autocrat intent on world domination.

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“…Rather, I suggest that the moulding of corporate subjectivity provides a useful forum to examine the connections between ostensibly de-politicized forms of morality and the economic interests of global business. I am interested in how morality is woven into the production of new forms of corporate personhood (Kirsch 2014), taking my lead from Dinah Rajak's insights about how corporations, through forms of story-telling, create an "imaginary of a moral self" which intensifies, rather than ameliorates, the most destructive elements of global capitalism. Writing about the mining company Anglo-American, Rajak argues that "narratives of philanthropy play a key role neither as the antithesis to the logic of capitalism, nor as the company's conscience, but as the warm-blooded twin to the violence of corporate imperialism" (2014: 266).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%