corporation

corporation, specific legal form of organization of persons and material resources, chartered by the state, for the purpose of conducting business.

As contrasted with the other two major forms of business ownership, the sole proprietorship and the partnership, the corporation is distinguished by a number of characteristics that make it a more-flexible instrument for large-scale economic activity, particularly for the purpose of raising large sums of capital for investment. Chief among these features are: (1) limited liability, meaning that capital suppliers are not subject to losses greater than the amount of their investment; (2) transferability of shares, whereby voting and other rights in the enterprise may be transferred readily from one investor to another without reconstituting the organization under law; (3) juridical personality, meaning that the corporation itself as a fictive “person” has legal standing and may thus sue and be sued, may make contracts, and may hold property in a common name; and (4) indefinite duration, whereby the life of the corporation may extend beyond the participation of any of its incorporators. The owners of the corporation in a legal sense are the shareholders, who purchase with their investment of capital a share in the proceeds of the enterprise and who are nominally entitled to a measure of control over the financial management of the corporation.

The form of the modern business corporation originated in a fusion of the type of commercial association known as the joint-stock company, which was in fact a partnership, and the traditional legal form of the corporation as it had been developed for medieval guilds, municipalities, monasteries, and universities. Although business corporations were formed in England as early as the 16th century, these enterprises were monopolies chartered by the crown for the pursuit of strict mercantilist policies and were thus closer, in some respects, to the form of the modern public corporation than to that of the private business corporation.

The fusion of the two forms took place incrementally over the first two-thirds of the 19th century in Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany with the passage of general incorporation laws, which gradually made incorporation a more or less routine matter for business enterprises. Particularly influential for this development in the United States was the fact that powers of incorporation were largely restricted to the individual states under the Constitution, which led in the late 19th century to competition between the states for liberalization of their respective incorporation laws. Given the freedom of interstate commerce guaranteed under the Constitution, would-be incorporators could choose the state in which they wished to incorporate without compromising their freedom to transact business in any other state.

Strong impetus for this fusion of the two forms arose from, and was intensified by, the spread of new capital-intensive technologies of production and transportation. In particular, the construction of railroads—a matter of pressing national importance for all industrializing nations in the late 19th century—required large sums of capital that could be secured only through the corporate form and, in fact, only with many innovations in the development of financial and debt instruments within the corporate form. Moreover, the railroads made possible, and in some cases made necessary, an enormous expansion of existing industries (notably steel and coal) that the corporate form alone could support. By the final third of the 19th century, the last legal obstacles to the corporate form had been removed, and the ensuing period (c. 1870–1910) saw an unprecedented expansion of industrial production and the concomitant predominance of the corporate form. However, with these developments came new problems. Large industrial corporations such as the Standard Oil Company and the United States Steel Corporation came to exercise monopolistic powers in their respective economic spheres, often apparently at the cost of the public interest. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt sought to curb this concentration of corporate power in the early 20th century, urging the enactment of antitrust legislation aimed at preserving competition.

As corporations increased in size and geographic scope, control of the enterprise by its nominal owners, the shareholders, became impossible when the number of shareholders for the largest companies grew to the tens of thousands and as the practice of proxy voting (i.e., the voting of shares of absent stockholders by management in the annual shareholders’ meetings) was legalized and adopted. Salaried managers came to exercise virtually proprietary discretion over the corporation and its assets, which gave rise to debates that continue today over the nature of ownership and the social responsibility of corporations. (See multinational corporation.) Shareholders have nonetheless attempted to influence the actions of corporations through annual proxy proposals.

The contemporary social, economic, and, in many cases, political importance of business corporations is beyond dispute. The millions of corporations throughout the world dominate the manufacturing, energy, and service-industry sectors of most developed and many developing nations.