Corporations and American Democracy by Naomi R. Lamoreaux

Author:Naomi R. Lamoreaux [Lamoreaux, Naomi R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

By fairly early in the twentieth century, what had emerged to dominate the U.S. economy and imagination was, as Galambos tells us, “a new culture, a corporate culture, which included … a new public image of the giant corporation.”160 While people were generally concerned about the possibility of abuse of power, they also found that “the bureaucratized corporation shared many values with the middle-class reformers who led the progressive movement in state and national politics.”161

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the analysis above tends to treat “corporations” as synonymous with “big business.” The new entities that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and shaped thinking about corporations through most of the twentieth century were indeed very big businesses. But while a significant number of very large business corporations have existed in the United States since the early twentieth century, an even greater number of other types of corporations have also existed.162 These other types of corporations include small, closely held business firms, nonprofits, cooperatives, and membership organizations, all organized using the corporate form, and many of which have been around in abundance since the eighteenth century. Discussions about the nature and function of “corporations” and concerns about the impact of corporations on public policy today are generally based on an image of corporations as big bureaucratic businesses, not as these other types of corporations. For many of these other types of corporations it may well be appropriate to regard them as associations of individuals. Just as researchers and the general public have often not been careful about distinguishing the type of corporation under discussion, we see next that the Supreme Court often failed to distinguish between large publicly traded business corporations and other types of corporations in its jurisprudence on corporations and constitutional rights.

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