"Organization Design and Power"

Webinar  

"Organization Design and Power"

Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 at 10 am Eastern Time

Firms need access to input markets -- capital, labor, and supplies -- and a rule-bound product market in which to sell the output. Progressive efforts to tame the corporation have focused on each of these: antitrust for product and supply markets; reforms for capital and labor markets in the New Deal. But the digital revolution has radically changed the operations of each of the markets, and thus old reforms don’t fit. Antitrust is of little help for “free” social media platforms. Much employment law does not apply to contractors. Dispersed supply chains make it nearly impossible to hold firms accountable for their use of conflict minerals. Separating commercial and investment banking is irrelevant due to rampant securitization. Enterprises are often pop-ups that “rent” key inputs and thus require little outside capital. We need a systematic analysis of the nature of economic power in the digital age to tame the contemporary corporation and provide a basis for future research.

Objective: To survey the issues of corporate power in the 21st century and the tools available -- now and in the future -- to constrain it.

Introduction to the speaker:Jerry Davis received his PhD from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and taught at Northwestern and Columbia before moving to the University of Michigan, where he is the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Sociology. In 2020-21 he is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has been a department chair, associate dean, journal editor, professional association chair, and apparently a patsy for every random request for “service.” Davis’s research is broadly concerned with the corporation as a social and economic vehicle. His current book project examines corporate power in the 21st century, and how to tame it. You can find out more at https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/jerrydavis/home