The Corporation
The Corporation is a film/documentary that criticizes the concept of the corporation and what they do; as a result of the damages they have been causing the society.
This film starts showing a set of scandals in the USA because of frauds and bad behaviors of companies such as Kmart, Enron and Xerox.
The main critic is that companies just care about making profit and like that they just worried about their activities in order to reach that goal. They just don’t care about the damages they may cause their workers, the environment, health problems their products can represent… and many other things.
The film addresses different issues like the birth and the evolution of corporations into what they are today, making a huge emphasis on the concept of “legal person”, they analyze corporations as if they had the pathology of a psychopathic, they take a look at topics like “Corporate Social Responsibility”, their advertising campaigns, corporations during World War Two working with the Nazis and how they build a brand, among other topics.
In order to justify all their points of view, they count with the participation of recognized professors such as Joe Badaracco a professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School and Dr. Samuel Epstein an Emeritus Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine of the University of Illinois. They also count with the participation of recognized CEOs (formers and current) like Sir Mark Moody-Stuart former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell and Sam Gibara CEO of Goodyear Tire, who in a way tried to present a better image of what corporations do. There were also activists such as Oscar Olivera a leader of a movement in Bolivia in order to fight the privatization of the water, Robert Monks a shareholder activist and corporate governance adviser and Dr. Vandana Shiva, who fights for the rights of women and the protection of the environment in India, she is also a physicist and ecologist.
And they count with other personalities such as Milton Friedma an economist with a Nobel Prize, Jane Akre a news reporter and Michael Moore recognized for its documentaries and critics to many corporations… along with many other people.
With all these people, the investigations they made, the evidences they showed… they have very solid arguments and they open people’s eyes to things we feel in the air but that we just let pass by. It is also a very well compilation of these issues and it is like connecting the dots to have a broader picture.
Still the idea is not to generalize those bad behaviors and put the corporations as evil institutions.
As they mentioned a corporation is finally a group of people that gets together in order to achieve some objectives, being the most important one to gain return for the owners. But for me the idea of looking for profits is not the issue, the thing is, like they show in the film, what they do and how they leave ethics to gain money and in a way how unsatisfied we are with what we get, that corporations don’t measure what they gain nor how they leave others in bad conditions.
Nevertheless, the most important thing is that a corporation is finally a group of people, so the corporation is not the one to blame but the people, who have turned some corporations into such monsters, are. The corporation as the legal person became the responsible for the actions and is finally the one in the spotlight, not the people who runs it. And like Mr. Monks said bringing a phrase of Baron Thurlow corporations “have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate”, being like that the perfect way to get things through. The corporations have no moral, anyway we expect the people who work in them and are the leaders to have one.
When most of the CEOs defended themselves saying that they are good people, who just had to do their job in order to keep it and that they were aware of some things they tried to correct but that sometimes “something/someone” in their corporations stop them, you want to believe them, since they don’t seem as bad people. But then you hear in the news things such as the General Motors CEO having in 2007 a salary of around US$ 15 million and then talking about a huge crisis and wanting to fire people… and the General Motors is not the guilty one, but that CEO and others who have such salaries and refuse to give all their employees better salaries or invest in things that could improve the environment. And the stockholders who invested on the companies are not always the ones who get all the money unless they have a huge percentage of those stocks, which finally enables them to make decisions on how to run the corporation… The human being is the one who has made things bad all around.
Of course we need money in today’s world. We need food, we need clothes, we have basic needs and of course we want to pamper ourselves with some things and even luxuries… but one person having all that money and many other others surviving with less than US$ 1, makes you think about who have we turned into.
We don’t even need to go to a CEO or a big corporation. A person willing to make money or getting something they really want, won’t care about the other person standing next to him, or the damages they cause with what they do, and less if the threaten comes in the future, since they may not even be there.
Tacking another thing from the movie, the objective is not necessarily making money, but as I said getting through with something. Lucy Hughes the vice president of Initiative Media talks very proud of what they do in her company concerning advertising for kids.
First we see how kids nag their parents to get the things they have seen through advertising, things they don’t really desire, so with the media we all are learning to push to get something. And then we see Ms. Hughes again and how happy she is saying that they manipulate consumers, that it is a game, that they are establishing a communication with the consumers of tomorrow, and that she really doesn’t know it what they do is ethical, but that the thing is that they are moving a product through media and that is finally her goal. She got there!!! How?? She just doesn’t care.
But come on, we have a slight idea of what ethic is and if you got people around you questioning what you do, it gotta mean there is something kind of bad going on.
The movie also focuses on the people as the ones able to make a change. They want to make us aware situations such as our relations towards the institutions where we are; they want to rescue democracy concepts and obligations of the governments… they even show people working in corporations and making huge efforts to go through better ways, correcting their mistakes and succeed, we also see movements like the one promoted by Ms. Shiva. Those are great things.
However they also talk about some sort of complots against corporations and for me that’s not the real and correct solution. There are good corporations, they even showed Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Inc. and how he came to realize the damages its products were causing the environment and the effect it has on us, the consequences for the future, and he decided to change their processes, and many other things that made his corporation not only environmental friendly, but also more responsible towards society in other aspects. They even mentioned that they are the largest commercial carpet manufacturer of the world. It means we can have more success acting properly and people notice it.
It looks true that some people working in large corporations have influences in the governments; that others use corporate social responsibility with bad intentions… but I insist corporations are not the menace. We as human beings are the responsible ones.
With the environment it is not only Shell the guilty for producing oil, we are happy using huge cars where just one person goes, instead of taking the bus. If we have measures like “pico y placa” we go and buy a second car… and that is just to mention one thing, because if you think about it we do tons of things.
The solution for me is to educate people, to rescue values and ethics… that’s how we’ll make a change in our lives and in the corporations we have and the ones of the future.
Finally, I would like to say that I really liked the movie, it was very well done, the people they got were awesome in order to make their statements and the best is that it makes people think more deeply about businesses and make us question many things, and it is definitely important for us since we may be working in some of those “evil” corporations. Maybe we could make that change!!!
This film starts showing a set of scandals in the USA because of frauds and bad behaviors of companies such as Kmart, Enron and Xerox.
The main critic is that companies just care about making profit and like that they just worried about their activities in order to reach that goal. They just don’t care about the damages they may cause their workers, the environment, health problems their products can represent… and many other things.
The film addresses different issues like the birth and the evolution of corporations into what they are today, making a huge emphasis on the concept of “legal person”, they analyze corporations as if they had the pathology of a psychopathic, they take a look at topics like “Corporate Social Responsibility”, their advertising campaigns, corporations during World War Two working with the Nazis and how they build a brand, among other topics.
In order to justify all their points of view, they count with the participation of recognized professors such as Joe Badaracco a professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School and Dr. Samuel Epstein an Emeritus Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine of the University of Illinois. They also count with the participation of recognized CEOs (formers and current) like Sir Mark Moody-Stuart former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell and Sam Gibara CEO of Goodyear Tire, who in a way tried to present a better image of what corporations do. There were also activists such as Oscar Olivera a leader of a movement in Bolivia in order to fight the privatization of the water, Robert Monks a shareholder activist and corporate governance adviser and Dr. Vandana Shiva, who fights for the rights of women and the protection of the environment in India, she is also a physicist and ecologist.
And they count with other personalities such as Milton Friedma an economist with a Nobel Prize, Jane Akre a news reporter and Michael Moore recognized for its documentaries and critics to many corporations… along with many other people.
With all these people, the investigations they made, the evidences they showed… they have very solid arguments and they open people’s eyes to things we feel in the air but that we just let pass by. It is also a very well compilation of these issues and it is like connecting the dots to have a broader picture.
Still the idea is not to generalize those bad behaviors and put the corporations as evil institutions.
As they mentioned a corporation is finally a group of people that gets together in order to achieve some objectives, being the most important one to gain return for the owners. But for me the idea of looking for profits is not the issue, the thing is, like they show in the film, what they do and how they leave ethics to gain money and in a way how unsatisfied we are with what we get, that corporations don’t measure what they gain nor how they leave others in bad conditions.
Nevertheless, the most important thing is that a corporation is finally a group of people, so the corporation is not the one to blame but the people, who have turned some corporations into such monsters, are. The corporation as the legal person became the responsible for the actions and is finally the one in the spotlight, not the people who runs it. And like Mr. Monks said bringing a phrase of Baron Thurlow corporations “have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate”, being like that the perfect way to get things through. The corporations have no moral, anyway we expect the people who work in them and are the leaders to have one.
When most of the CEOs defended themselves saying that they are good people, who just had to do their job in order to keep it and that they were aware of some things they tried to correct but that sometimes “something/someone” in their corporations stop them, you want to believe them, since they don’t seem as bad people. But then you hear in the news things such as the General Motors CEO having in 2007 a salary of around US$ 15 million and then talking about a huge crisis and wanting to fire people… and the General Motors is not the guilty one, but that CEO and others who have such salaries and refuse to give all their employees better salaries or invest in things that could improve the environment. And the stockholders who invested on the companies are not always the ones who get all the money unless they have a huge percentage of those stocks, which finally enables them to make decisions on how to run the corporation… The human being is the one who has made things bad all around.
Of course we need money in today’s world. We need food, we need clothes, we have basic needs and of course we want to pamper ourselves with some things and even luxuries… but one person having all that money and many other others surviving with less than US$ 1, makes you think about who have we turned into.
We don’t even need to go to a CEO or a big corporation. A person willing to make money or getting something they really want, won’t care about the other person standing next to him, or the damages they cause with what they do, and less if the threaten comes in the future, since they may not even be there.
Tacking another thing from the movie, the objective is not necessarily making money, but as I said getting through with something. Lucy Hughes the vice president of Initiative Media talks very proud of what they do in her company concerning advertising for kids.
First we see how kids nag their parents to get the things they have seen through advertising, things they don’t really desire, so with the media we all are learning to push to get something. And then we see Ms. Hughes again and how happy she is saying that they manipulate consumers, that it is a game, that they are establishing a communication with the consumers of tomorrow, and that she really doesn’t know it what they do is ethical, but that the thing is that they are moving a product through media and that is finally her goal. She got there!!! How?? She just doesn’t care.
But come on, we have a slight idea of what ethic is and if you got people around you questioning what you do, it gotta mean there is something kind of bad going on.
The movie also focuses on the people as the ones able to make a change. They want to make us aware situations such as our relations towards the institutions where we are; they want to rescue democracy concepts and obligations of the governments… they even show people working in corporations and making huge efforts to go through better ways, correcting their mistakes and succeed, we also see movements like the one promoted by Ms. Shiva. Those are great things.
However they also talk about some sort of complots against corporations and for me that’s not the real and correct solution. There are good corporations, they even showed Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Inc. and how he came to realize the damages its products were causing the environment and the effect it has on us, the consequences for the future, and he decided to change their processes, and many other things that made his corporation not only environmental friendly, but also more responsible towards society in other aspects. They even mentioned that they are the largest commercial carpet manufacturer of the world. It means we can have more success acting properly and people notice it.
It looks true that some people working in large corporations have influences in the governments; that others use corporate social responsibility with bad intentions… but I insist corporations are not the menace. We as human beings are the responsible ones.
With the environment it is not only Shell the guilty for producing oil, we are happy using huge cars where just one person goes, instead of taking the bus. If we have measures like “pico y placa” we go and buy a second car… and that is just to mention one thing, because if you think about it we do tons of things.
The solution for me is to educate people, to rescue values and ethics… that’s how we’ll make a change in our lives and in the corporations we have and the ones of the future.
Finally, I would like to say that I really liked the movie, it was very well done, the people they got were awesome in order to make their statements and the best is that it makes people think more deeply about businesses and make us question many things, and it is definitely important for us since we may be working in some of those “evil” corporations. Maybe we could make that change!!!
Note: The Corporation is a documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Baka, made during 2003.
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