This history of the corporation is a meandering and expanding one but one thing that is common among them, more often than not, is that the profit motive overshadows the potential negative impacts they have on society and the place we all call home. While today’s landscape of corporate structure has broadened to include more mission driven, or worker owned structures, there remain mechanisms in place and questions left unasked that keep the corporation fundamentally flawed. In this session we will hear from leading experts who are asking those questions and are developing mechanisms that can radically move the goalpost.
SPEAKERS
Colin Mayer is the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Professorial Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, the UK Government Natural Capital Committee, and the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Playhouse. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours. He was chairman of Oxera Ltd. between 1986 and 2010 and is a director of the energy modelling company, Aurora Energy Research Ltd. He leads the British Academy enquiry into “the Future of the Corporation” and his most recent book Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good is published by Oxford University Press.
Michelle Meagher is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University College London Centre for Law, Economics and Society and co-founder of the Inclusive Competition Forum, a think tank focused on democratising corporate power and the enforcement of competition law. Michelle is a UK- and US-qualified lawyer, specialising in competition law and corporate governance. Michelle sits on the corporate governance committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Michelle's first book, Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What To Do About It, will be published by Penguin Business in September 2020.
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at The New School, and co-edited the subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.
Jennifer Lyn Morone is the CEO of RadicalxChange Foundation and a multi-disciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience in relation to technology, economics, politics, and identity and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future. Morone is a trained sculptor with BFA from SUNY Purchase and earned her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London with Dunne and Raby. Her work has been presented at institutions, festivals, museums, and galleries around the world including ZKM, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ars Electronica, HEK, the Martin Gropius Bau, the Science Gallery, Transmediale, SMBA, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, panke.gallery, Aksioma, Drugo more, and featured extensively on international media outlets such as the Economist, WIRED, WMMNA, Vice, the Guardian, BBC World News, Tagesspiegel, Netzpolitik, the Observer.
