Robert Jenkins and Roberto Abazoski
“The Corporation,” a documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, describes the evils of multinational corporations. To quickly summarize the documentary, it’s about to what extremes people will go to for money.
A corporation is a business separate from it’s owners, meaning the owners pay others to run the company. Shareholders also own it. However, the business itself is its own individual entity in which serves as a legal human being. Therefore, the shareholders and board members have no legal obligations or liability to corporate actions. For example if you want to sue the board of Sears you would have to sue the company as a whole, not the people who run it.
Films like these are necessary because they put out information that large companies try so hard to distort or hide. For example, Monsanto’s product, Posilac, which was created for cows to produce more milk, was later proven to cause cancer and other health implications. Former Monsanto employees exposed them, but to prevent from seeming bad, Monsanto personally publicized what they did after rewording their original document about 80 times to seem as less harmful as possible. Their business shouldn’t be our business, but when it involves us [the consumers to their products and services] we should know what’s going on. The research that went into this documentary was well done; it casted the light onto this issue pretty well. However, it definitely made us disfavor the idea of corporations after watching it, in the sense that it vilified all existing corporations.
While we felt that the movie’s research and way to elaborate on the information was handled extremely well, it also created an extremely generalized opinion about businesses and how each one acts. The movie focuses solely on the ones that are money grubbing and have previous history of breaking laws or mistreating the environment as a way to raise their bottom line. It ignores the fact that there are numerous corporations that do not follow this money grubbing mentality and actually have great programs that allow them to be socially responsible.
The overall question that this movie asks is to whom does a corporation owe a social obligation to? It goes on to force feed their answer; corporations owe it to the people and the world to do act morally. They spread this idea with a various amount of statistics and records disasters caused by the activity of a corporation.
A corporation is a business separate from it’s owners, meaning the owners pay others to run the company. Shareholders also own it. However, the business itself is its own individual entity in which serves as a legal human being. Therefore, the shareholders and board members have no legal obligations or liability to corporate actions. For example if you want to sue the board of Sears you would have to sue the company as a whole, not the people who run it.
Films like these are necessary because they put out information that large companies try so hard to distort or hide. For example, Monsanto’s product, Posilac, which was created for cows to produce more milk, was later proven to cause cancer and other health implications. Former Monsanto employees exposed them, but to prevent from seeming bad, Monsanto personally publicized what they did after rewording their original document about 80 times to seem as less harmful as possible. Their business shouldn’t be our business, but when it involves us [the consumers to their products and services] we should know what’s going on. The research that went into this documentary was well done; it casted the light onto this issue pretty well. However, it definitely made us disfavor the idea of corporations after watching it, in the sense that it vilified all existing corporations.
While we felt that the movie’s research and way to elaborate on the information was handled extremely well, it also created an extremely generalized opinion about businesses and how each one acts. The movie focuses solely on the ones that are money grubbing and have previous history of breaking laws or mistreating the environment as a way to raise their bottom line. It ignores the fact that there are numerous corporations that do not follow this money grubbing mentality and actually have great programs that allow them to be socially responsible.
The overall question that this movie asks is to whom does a corporation owe a social obligation to? It goes on to force feed their answer; corporations owe it to the people and the world to do act morally. They spread this idea with a various amount of statistics and records disasters caused by the activity of a corporation.
As a separate entity corporations are legally looked at as an individual person, so it leads you to believe what type of person it would be. So after opening the viewers’ eyes of an in-depth list of flaws in corporations, they rule that if corporations such as Shell, Wal-Mart, and Kraft were human they would be psychopaths. This is based on the fact that because corporations hold a legal obligation to their shareholders to get larger and more profitable, and that they actually don’t possess emotion. Creating an identity that doesn’t know right from wrong. Therefore, citizens must step up and change the way the world does business because in its current form, good is impossible to be the outcome of a corporation with the desire to gain power.
The purpose of this movie was to inform viewers about the growing problem in the culture of the business world. In which companies feel that the sole purpose of their existence is to make as much money as they can no matter what that entails. It achieves this with historical scandals by different companies and a breakdown on the effects that employees, companies and the culture of business. In all, it leaves you with the idea that you can somehow change this, but leaves you to think about what actions should be taken.
The purpose of this movie was to inform viewers about the growing problem in the culture of the business world. In which companies feel that the sole purpose of their existence is to make as much money as they can no matter what that entails. It achieves this with historical scandals by different companies and a breakdown on the effects that employees, companies and the culture of business. In all, it leaves you with the idea that you can somehow change this, but leaves you to think about what actions should be taken.