Theorising Corporate Governance
This project has a past/present and a future aspect to it. In the past/present, it has looked at how the company takes up space in the world, and the kinds of values and projects to which it is willing to be ‘connected’. The problem of ‘corporate social responsibility’ has been of particular interest, as a test of the extent and manner in which social and environmental values might be admitted or addressed by calculative rationalities.
A relatively dark assessment of social prospects in this part emerges out of an eclectic use of theory, which draws on Baudrillard, Polanyi, Latour, as well as literature, art and film subjects. This is called the ‘Bound to Shop’ stage of works.
The second stage of the research project is called Making Time for the Corporation.The focus shifts here from the occupation of social space by the company to its orientation in time.
The ‘corporate law’ problem concerns how to turn the company towards the ‘longer term’, or the kinds of ‘futures’ that are extractable from corporate governance. The project works with the notions of projection, resolution, movement, as well as (after Bound to Shop), obligation, affect, and debt. It seeks to develop its own methodologies for observation, employing artistic practices to the study of time and corporate governance. This turn towards the arts is preceded by the work in Bound to Shop. Capturing the company’s times in artistic practices allows for exploring the ‘art’ to governing the economy, as well as its ‘scientific’ aspects. It probes a legal imaginary appropriate to subverting the problematic aspects of ‘new governance’.