Conceiving the Company: A Collection of Essays on the Nature and Purpose of the Basic Unit of Analysis in Business Research

This PhD thesis offers an inquiry into the nature and purpose of the basic unit of analysis in business research: the company. The thesis is born out of a multi-disciplinary research project, which has considered its object of inquiry through multiple lenses. The thesis is presented as a series of four essays all encircling the company to address the governing research question of the thesis: How does ownership affect the purpose, delimitation, and outcomes of the company? Chapters two through four are structured as self-contained scientific papers aimed at publication in suitable peer reviewed outlets. In this way, each individual paper adopts a specific lens and addresses an individual part of the overall research question. Chapter one, then, provides a meta narrative and presents a collective reading of the three papers. In providing this narrative, it recounts the process of the PhD project thereby offering a testimony of research practice from the perspective of a junior scholar. In the collective reading of the three papers, this chapter furthermore considers the individual position in terms of philosophy of science adopted in each paper and situates their contribution in the narrative and joint contribution of the entire research project. In this way, chapter one considers how the three individual parts collectively address the research question of the thesis thereby contributing to our understanding of the nature and purpose of the company as it relates to ownership. In all of the papers, the concept of ownership takes center stage. Ownership offers a baseline for what is commonly accepted – in both academia and practice – as a basic truth about the nature of the company: the company is, first and foremost, perceived as the property of its owner. Although all three papers encircle the concept of ownership and consider the role of ownership in relation to the company, the approaches adopted in the individual parts differ significantly both methodologically and in conception. In chapter two, the paper Foundation Ownership and Firm Performance poses the question: what happens when a company undergoes a fundamental change in owner identity? Specifically, the paper empirically investigates the effect of changing from person ownership to foundation ownership. In order to measure this effect, the paper runs a difference-in-differences estimation on a hand-collected sample of companies that change from person to foundation ownership. This sample is matched through propensity score matching against a control group of companies that do not change ownership. Theoretically, foundation ownership is viewed as an owner identity aimed at the long term with no disciplinary personal profit incentive, such that the company should hypothetically incur costs in the short term when changing from person- to foundation ownership. Contrary to these predictions of agency theory, the study finds no negative effects on performance of the ownership change. On the contrary, it is found that a change to foundation ownership is associated with firm growth as measured by assets. In this way, the paper challenges basic assumptions of dominant corporate governance theory In chapter three, the paper What we talk about, when we talk about Business considers the conceptualization of the ‘company’ – proposed to be the master signifier of the basic business entity and the basic unit of analysis in business research – through history and in extant research. The paper details the emergence and conditions for conceptualisations of the ‘company’ both historically and across different literature streams in extant research as well as the implications of delimitations of the company for perceptions of its purpose. In this work, it analyses a multitude of theoretical apparatuses and proposes a categorization of these extant conceptions of the company across literature streams in a conceptual hierarchy of three main significations. First, from a legal perspective, as the aspect of ‘corporation’, focusing on the company’s contractual relations and position in specific jurisdictions affording rights and duties within these jurisdictions. Second, from an economic perspective, as the aspect of ‘firm’, focusing on its instrumental value as a productive machine employed towards economic goals of growth and prosperity. Third, from a socially constructed perspective, as a subset of the category ‘organization’, focusing on the dynamics of human and non-human actors comprising the company and external to the company in processes marked by power dynamics and the broader institutional context. It furthermore finds that the ‘company’ and its excess of meaning signified by ‘firm’, ‘corporation’, and ‘organization’ emerges in a historical process entwined with questions of morality pertaining to concerns to the individual and the collective structured around conceptions ‘ownership’ and its moral affordances. It consequently observes that narrow conceptions of the ‘company’ as ‘firm’, ‘corporation’, or ‘organization’ affords paths of least resistance to perceptions of its purpose. In chapter four, the paper ‘Unlife’: An Ontological Inquiry into the Nature of the Company proposes an addition to the extant theories of the company analysed in chapter three. The paper departs from the position that, in their different conceptual foci – as ‘firm’, ‘corporation’, or as ‘organization’ – extant conceptions of the ‘company’ do not ontologically address the question of the company’s basic nature in itself. In chapter four, I to bridge this gap by developing and proposing a theory of the ‘unlife’ of the company out of the relation between the company and the prototypical owner – the founder. I find that the proposed theory has ontological implications for our understanding of the nature of the company. As a theoretical apparatus for this paper, I utilize Žižek’s mobilization of the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive and the Lacanian notion of the symbolic order and the Other to consider the extent to which, and if so how, we can conceive of the company as a not-quite subject, a not-quite moral agent. I propose that founding bears the structure of the Žižekian basic ethical act and that it consequently constitutes the company as an ‘unliving’ entity with an ‘unlife’ enshrined in economic, legal, and social technologies of ‘firm’, ‘corporation’, and ‘organization’ which – out of resonance with their own basic human condition – is enacted by the Other. Out of this theory, it becomes possible to write a myth of origin of a basic not-quite ethic of business informing a basic morality of business itself. Consequently, I consider the place and life of this morality – and the ‘unliving’ entity informing it – in discourse.