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fta: on the last point you make: agreed. i do that too much, often without really thinking about it. so am taking this under advisement, for whatever that's worth.
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on the stakeholder matter: the extent to which stakeholder groups influence various aspects of corporate action (and a trade union would be a stakeholder group, for example--and therein lay some of the problems of the term and traces of its origin in bidness ethics--which is another topic) is in the main a function of the political situation and internal culture of that corporation. one way of looking at the relations between stakeholder groups and the corporation is as a conflict over borders between public (by which i mean zones of activity that can be understood as having effects on a wider public--externalities in the parlance---and so which should be matters of public and/or political concern and action) and private (zones of activity which do not generate such effects, which may not be legitimate targets of public concern/political action)....using this (admittedly general) notion of the public, or of public action (or actions for which corporate entities can and should be held politically accountable) i tend to argue for the widest extension of the notion of the public. because i do not see anything about corporate activity that should not be held up as matters of public concern/political concern/political action. call it my residual marxist because it is. i would argue that economic activity is public activity. all of it. even shareholder investments--first because the distribution of wealth within a given social order is a political question, second because the money invested is going into entities that are themselves engaged in public activity, and which can and should be held politically accountable for that activity.
that this is even a question is an index of how far things have degenerated ideologically over the past 40 years or so in the wake the shift away from nation-state oriented capitalism--which undercut trade unions--which undercutting enabled capital to jettison the political redefinitions that the trade union movement had forced it to accept--redefinitions what made very fundamental types of corporate activity into conflict areas--at stake in these conflicts were questions of power--implicit in these power conflicts were questions of who *should* shape the nature and distribution of profits (for example)--behind this were basically antithetical views of what profit comes from--for investors, then as now, it seems that wealth would be generated by investment; for trade unions, wealth is produced by labor. this is a version of the backstory behind my arguments here--probably should have explained this more (in retrospect at least), but figured i would try to keep the thread geared toward the op. so now is as good a time as any.
i dont think anything i am arguing for is "odd"--it just comes out of a view of capitalism as a collection of historical processes--and from my not forgetting about that history when i think about contemporary capitalism. that this seems odd is to me what is odd--but that's (again) another matter.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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