Larry Catá Backer (Pennsylvania State University, Penn State Dickinson Law) has posted Power, Purpose, and Control—the Corporation as Platform, Router, and Control/Compliance Space in an Emerging World Order on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay reconsiders the conventional narrative of a ‘fracturing world order’ by shifting the unit of analysis from the state to the enterprise. The notion of fracture, I argue, is bound up in the cognitive premises of its observer—a function of the observer’s commitment to the state as the foundational unit of ordering. Observed from the vantage point of the multinational enterprise, what appears as fracture is more accurately described as consolidation: the migration of ordering functions from state-based systems to enterprise-based systems organized around supply, production, and use chains, and mediated through compliance architectures and datafied governance. The corporation is reconceived as simultaneously a platform—a space within which ordering occurs; a router—directing flows of value, compliance expectations, data, and normative obligations across legal orders; and a control/compliance space—the site where governance is operationalized through internalized systems of accountability, risk, and compliance grammars. The emerging order fractures not only the state and its international system but also the individual, who is reconstituted as the sum of desires, behaviors, and data points within platform-enterprise spaces.
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Lawrence Solum