- Sep 2024
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www.biblonia.com www.biblonia.com
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In an age where "corporate" evokes images of towering glass buildings and faceless multinational conglomerates, it's easy to forget that the roots of the word lie in something far more tangible and human: the body.In the medieval period, the idea of a corporation wasn't about shareholder value or quarterly profits; it was about flesh and blood, a community bound together as a single "body"—a corpus.
Via [[Lee Bryant]]
corporation from corpus. Medieval roots of corporation were people brought together in a single purpose/economic entity. Guilds, cities. Based on Roman law roots, where a corpus could have legal personhood status. Overtones of collective identity, governance. Pointer suggests a difference with how we see corporations as does the first paragraph here, but the piece itself sees mostly parallels actually. Note that Roman/medieval corpora were about property, (royal) privileges. That is a diff e.g. in US where corporates seek to both be a legal person (wrt politics/finance) and seek distance from accountability a person would have (pollution, externalising negative impacts). I treat a legal entity also as a trade: it bestows certain protections and privileges on me as entrepreneur, but also certain conditions and obligations (public transparancy, financial reporting etc.)
A contrast with ME corpus is seeing [[Corporations as Slow AI 20180201210258]] (anonymous processes, mindlessly wandering to a financial goal)
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