Transcending The Corporation

Abstract

Recent developments in experiments with legal organizational forms are injecting diversity into the relative monoculture of the corporate form. Two threads are of particular interest in this chapter. The first concerns the creation of hybrid legal structures for “social enterprise.” The second stems from a revival of interest in cooperative structures, particularly in tandem with the digital economy. The chapter places these two threads in dialogue with Simon Deakin’s recent stimulating argument that the commons provides the most convincing conceptual foundation for understanding corporate governance. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of governance experimentation in small-scale food enterprises. Since debates around the production and distribution of food increasingly center around the notion of food as a “commons,” this provides a useful illustration of some of the key implications of the chapter’s argument.