305 - Section on Sociology of Law Invited Session. Organizations as Legal Persons (co-sponsored with Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work)

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Recent legal decisions (such as Citizen's United and Hobby Lobby), coupled with recent public debates about corporate and personal responsibility (such as the anti-sweatshop movement and the wave of "complicity" objections to providing services for same-sex marriages), suggest a profound rethinking of the legal and cultural relationship between organization as "legal persons" and the "natural persons" who own, run, work for, buy from, and live near them. What forces are driving the current reexamination of corporate personhood? How do recent developments relate to larger societal trends and historical legacies? What impacts are these developments likely to have, and what research agendas might they inspire? This session explores these and related developments, situating corporate personhood in historical, political, cultural, theoretical and empirical context.

Sub Unit

• Section on Sociology of Law / Organizations as Legal Persons (Co-Sponsored with OOW)

Session Organizer

• Mark C. Suchman, Brown University

Presider

• Bruce G. Carruthers, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Farmers, Corporations, and the Moral Conception of Big Business, 1865-1920 - Carly Knight, Harvard University

• Firms’ Presentation of Self Through the Use of Anthropomorphizing Language - Grace Augustine, Northwestern University; Brayden G. King, Northwestern University

• From the Good to the Bad and the Ugly: Corporations' Social and Mass Media Reputations in Times of Crisis - Ion Bogdan Vasi, University of Iowa; Kang Zhao, University of Iowa; Shiyao Wang, University of Iowa

• The New Corporate Personhood: Authority, Authenticity, and the Ideology of Entrepreneurship - Mark C. Suchman, Brown University

Discussant

• Bruce G. Carruthers, Northwestern University