[root_axis]

A corporation is not "pure thought-stuff"; it is a legal designation for a physical business process facilitated by people and machines in the real world. The legal entity "corporation" is purely political, but the thing we really care about (a business process) is ultimately pegged to physical reality. The legal corporate entity is the map, the business-process-in-action is the territory.

[travisjungroth]

I totally agree with your map/territory analogy. When I’m referring to a corporation I’m not talking about all the physical things in the world (the company) but what you’re calling a legal entity.

I would also bet good money that most corporations in the world do not map directly to a business-process-in-action. Most corporations are a layer of abstraction of ownership. There are many more of these than real businesses in the physical world.