by Kornel Timar How can we stop environmental degradation? Is it possible to reverse this man-made mess and preserve our planet for good? The answer to this, according to scientists, is a strong maybe. As the CEO of the World Bank said in 2018, we are...
(Illustration by Sébastien Thibault) post by Clare Simpson For many in the West, we see freedom as our uninterrupted ability to set up businesses, make money, and then go and spend it in places like Dubai or Monaco. Yet what we don’t realise is that...
by Penny Meek The recent acceleration of globalisation has led to increasing political and economic power for transnational companies, with corporations having an increasingly important role in environmental preservation. For example, The Carbon Majors...
by Penny Meek The terms ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ ‘sustainability’ and ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ will not be unfamiliar to anyone in the Western world; these issues have dominated political discourse about environmental issues since the...
It is now widely known that most of the world’s great conglomerates and trans-national corporations are violating some of the most fundamental ethical codes we abide by. Nike used child labour for its production of footballs in Cambodia and Pakistan, Unilever and Amazon openly exploit their workers (Werner & Weiss, 2001), and these are just some of the plenty of examples of corporations exploiting their market power in order to achieve whatever their goals are as businesses. The phenomenon of increased attention to political issues such as social justice in our society recently could have been a way for the working class to finally expose these wrongdoings of the corporations.
Today economic activities and power are globally concentrated in a few large corporations. An active civil society, powered with mass media and information and communications technology along with social media easily locates the social and environmental impacts of the activities of corporations. This way corporations can be held accountable for any of their adverse actions and complemented / incentivised for their responsible actions.
(Photograph by Jonatan Svensson Glad on flickr) Post By Olivia Adamson 2.5 billion coffee cups are wasted every year, according to The Guardian 2018. Therefore it’s no surprise that this ecological monstrosity has led to the boom of eco-friendly products....
Image Source post by Helen Crowley A corporation - a separate legal entity created by individuals, stockholders, or shareholders, with the purpose of operating for profit. In modern society, the Corporation has arguably become the prevalent economic institution, with...
In today’s world, we are surrounded by corporations of many different kinds. From fast food chains like McDonald’s, to retail chains such as Walmart. These corporations appeal to the masses, and their status as corporations is clear from the fact that they sell us things. However, in this post, I would like to bring to attention a corporation that does not sell us any tangible object, social media. Social media generates revenue mainly through companies paying them for advertisements, not through selling the public things. Social media is widely used by many corporations in an attempt to reach out to their audience, but we often forget that they are corporations themselves. In this article, I hope to be able to show that, in the end, social media firms are just like any other corporation, that they are affected by the same thing as other corporations worldwide are affected by, perhaps even more given the nature of the internet.
You probably brush your teeth with a multinational conglomerate; hear from friends through a tech giant and drive using a horizontally integrated car firm. That is because corporations, those powerful social and economic institutions, have become embedded in our modern lives. We occasionally like to ask whether this is right, whether society should allow corporations to have more power and influence than our governments. We take to Twitter, rant on Facebook and document on Snapchat. As will be noted here, this sometimes leads to mobilising at a physical protest, too. After all, only our governments are (democratically) elected, and only they are designed to maximise social welfare, so upholding them against the motives of corporations doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Rightly or wrongly, corporations will always pursue profit. That is their nature, their design and it is wonderfully predictable. It is why economists are always quoted as saying that profit maximisation is the ‘aim’ of a corporation, because it is what evidence predominately suggests – not what economists prescribe corporations to do.
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