Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T13:41:05.104Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The personality of the corporation and the state (1905)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

Extract

Although there is now a thriving subdiscipline of economics and law, so far economists working on the theory of the firm have paid relatively little attention to earlier legal doctrines. One neglected juridical school of thought is the ‘real entity’ theory developed by William Jethro Brown (1868–1930) and others. Some writers have recently suggested that this has implications for our understanding of the nature of the firm.

Type
Fragment
Copyright
Copyright © The JOIE Foundation 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Blair, Margaret M. 1999, ‘Firm-Specific Human Capital and Theories of the Firm’, in Blair, Margaret M. and Roe, Mark (eds), Employees and Corporate Governance, Washington, DC: Brookings), pp. 5889.Google Scholar
Blair, Margaret, M. 2003, ‘Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century’, UCLA Law Review, 51 (2): 387455.Google Scholar
Bratton, William W. 1989a, ‘The “Nexus-of-Contracts” Corporation: A Critical Appraisal’, Cornell Law Review, 74 (2): 407465.Google Scholar
Bratton, William W. 1989b, ‘The New Economic Theory of the Firm’, Stanford Law Review, 21 (4): 365379.Google Scholar
Brown, W. Jethro 1905, ‘The Personality of the Corporation and the State’, Law Quarterly Review, 21: 365379.Google Scholar
Coase, Ronald H. 1937, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, 4, New Series (November): 386405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Commons, John R. 1934, Institutional Economics – Its Place in Political Economy, New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary 1990, ‘Converging on Autonomy: Anthropology and Institutional Economics’, in Williamson, Oliver E. (ed.), Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 98115.Google Scholar
Fama, Eugene F. 1980, ‘Agency Problems and the Theory of the Firm’, Journal of Political Economy, 88 (2): 288307. Reprinted in Putterman and Kroszner (1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gierke, Otto von 1868–81, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.Google Scholar
Gindis, David 2007, ‘Some Building Blocks for a Theory of the Firm as a Real Entity’, in Biondi, Yuri, Canziani, Arnaldo, and Kirat, Thierry (eds), The Firm as an Entity: Implications for Economics, Accounting and Law, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 266291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, Sanford J. and Hart, Oliver D. 1986, ‘The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration’, Journal of Political Economy, 94 (4): 691719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, Kraakman, Reinier, and Squire, Richard 2006, ‘Law and the Rise of the Firm’, Harvard Law Review, 119 (5): 13331403.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2001, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2002, ‘The Legal Nature of the Firm and the Myth of the Firm-Market Hybrid’, International Journal of the Economics of Business, 9 (1): 3760.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2007, ‘Meanings of Methodological Individualism’, Journal of Economic Methodology 14 (2): 211226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutter, Michael 1994, ‘Organism as a Metaphor in German Economic Thought’, in Mirowski, Philip (ed.), Natural Images in Economic Thought: ‘Markets Read in Tooth and Claw’, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 289321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iwai, Katsuhito 1999, ‘Persons, Things and Corporations: The Corporate Personality Controversy and Comparative Corporate Governance’, American Journal of Comparative Law, 47 (4): 583632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jensen, Michael C. and Meckling, William H. 1976, ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure’, Journal of Financial Economics, 3 (4): 305460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krabbe, Jacob Jan 1996, Historicism and Organicism in Economics: The Evolution of Thought, Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, Alfred 1920, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume, 8th edn, London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Phillips, Michael J. 1994, ‘Reappraising the Real Entity Theory of the Corporation’, Florida State University Law Review, 21 (4): 10611123.Google Scholar
Roe, Michael 1979, ‘Brown, William Jethro (1868–1930)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, pp. 447448.Google Scholar
Udéhn, Lars 2001, Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning, London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Udéhn, Lars 2002, ‘The Changing Face of Methodological Individualism’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28: 479507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weissman, David 2000, A Social Ontology, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Wiltshire, David 1978, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar