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by technicolorwhat
1793 days ago
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Serious question: We talk always about companies like they are are organisms and not run by people making decisions. I see texts referring to group, company, people. Who's making the decisions and why don't we address them by name? Would this not make them more accountable if we did? |
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Names and concepts are ultimately just shared mental interfaces for refering to and interacting with things in our environment. Everything above the atomic (in the original philosophical sense, here physically quark, Plank-length, and quantum-energy levels) is comprised of collections of other things, and the behaviours of certain sets of things organised in specific ways is distinctive enough that we apply different labels to them, even when the underlying components are the same.
A tree is a collection of carbon, water, and trace elements, but is more than the sum of its parts. A chair or house (if made of wood) are made of tree but not tree. And so on.
Describing things as behaviourally consistent concepts has been a useful mental model for me.
The moral element comes into play where there's intentionality in organisation and a realisation of misdirection in general public understanding. Interests groups and lobbying organisations often present themselves as freestanding or general member organisations, but in truth are mostly representing the interests of their largest members (the MPAA, RIAA, and various software interest / piracy groups come to mind). These have an "ablative heat shield effect" in drawing fire away from the principle member firms themselves. (This is played out across many, many such instances, not just the three I've given.)
The modern business corporation is in fact specifically a risk-externalising engine, and both it and its executive leadership play that role in at least part. I'd just addressed that in an earlier comment on this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910464