Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2015
What is a corporation? Ed Hartman momentarily hesitates, commenting that “the last thing we need is another metaphor for organizations.” The truth is that we can all too easily imagine—and will no doubt get—much worse than another metaphor or model for organizational structures, functions and behavior, but the critical question is, of course, how apt a metaphor is “the corporation as commons”? If excitement about a subject can be measured by the number of current metaphors,—witness the current overuse and abuse of the “information superhighway” image—then the nature of the corporation would still seem to be a vibrant topic. But whether a metaphor depicts business organizations as teams playing games, as free-for-alls, as military hierarchies or as “dog-eat-dog” jungles makes all the difference, not only in our understanding of organizations but in the way that the people in those organizations understand themselves and, consequently, behave and treat one another.
Hartman suggests that corporations and other large organizations are a lot like, in fact are (at least metaphorically) identical to, “a commons.” This is, admittedly, not a very pretty or exciting metaphor. It is rather rural for such an urbane subject, and the metaphor of sheep farming may suggest some unintended and unfortunate images in the corporate world. But, nevertheless, the metaphor of “the commons” has the virtue of being an old, rather established philosophical and political metaphor. Indeed, it is so well established that it is no longer considered to be a metaphor. Literally, the commons is publicly owned land on which any villager’s sheep may graze. It is obviously a finite resource, and its maintenance is in the interests of all.
1 The beginning of the turn can be seen in Vance Packard’s three-decade old best-seller, The Pyramid Climbers, published in 1962. The fast curve of the turn became evident in Michael Maccoby’s classic, The Gamesman, in 1975. The end of turn from cozy corporate life to what some have come to see as an amoral snakepit is brutally portrayed in Robert Jackall’s recent Moral Mazes, 1990.
2 See my Ethics and Excellence (Oxford, 1992) and Patricia Werhane’s The Legacy of Adam Smith as well as my review of Werhane (this journal, Vol. 3, No. 4).
3 I think Maclntyre misrepresents them on this when he claims that they were essentially egoists hiding behind a facade of philosophically manufactured “sympathy.”