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This chapter introduces the overall argument regarding the recent turn to authenticity in managerial discourse and practice. It places the concern with authenticity in an historical and cultural setting and demonstrates how the authenticity invited by organizations is delimited in a very specific manner. The evocation of non-work life as the source of authenticity is particularly salient. The Introduction also gives some preliminary directions for the political analysis of the corporation that is unpacked in the chapters that follow. Corporations and work more generally have tended to represent the antithesis of life since most of us would rather avoid it if at all possible. The drive for authenticity aims to inject a life of sorts into the workplace, but this has political ramifications. A brief summary of the chapters that follow is provided.

This concluding chapter draws together all of the treads and makes some final statements about the politics of authenticity in contemporary organizations. The analysis is especially indebted to the Italian autonomist ideas around non-work and the commons. If the non-commodifed commons is the inspiration for the ‘just be yourself’ managerial ideology, then a fuller authenticity might be best enjoyed when non-work becomes the central guiding norm of collective relations. Authenticity is not a relief from the toil of labour but a way of transplanting an alternative social universe in its place. This chapter argues that authenticity only seems important when it is absent — if the commons moved from its position of negativity and enjoyed a plush positivity, then perhaps the quest for personal authenticity at work would become obsolete. The implications of this conclusion are analysed in some detail before some final statement about the significance of the ‘just be yourself’ management approach are made.

The corporation has undergone a fundamental change over the last few decades from an organisation with predominantly tangible assets, such as buildings and equipment, to the ‘mindful corporation’ with intangible assets, such as brands, patents and reputations. While the corporation has made immense contributions to economic prosperity and development, it is also associated with growing levels of income and social inequality. To correct its deficiencies and restore trust, it needs to be reinvented for the 21st century. It should be reconceived as a means of commitment to the promotion of the interests of its customers and communities as well as enhancing the wealth of its investors. This requires a careful reconsideration of the purpose of the corporation and its associated forms of ownership and governance. The humanities have a vital role to play in achieving this.

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.

This chapter focuses on the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published in August 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means. The book instantly became a controversial classic, provided an ideological rationale for New Deal planning, consumer activism, labor organizing, and financial regulation of the large corporation and by extension of all American capitalism. Berle and Means argued that America's two hundred largest corporations, which then controlled one-third of the national wealth, had themselves abridged the fundamentals of a liberal capitalist order. Berle and Means were not Brandeisian “small is beautiful” trustbusters. Something more fundamental was wrong in that the immense power of those who ran America's largest corporations was essentially unfettered, not only by the state but also by those who were their ostensible masters: the shareholder themselves.

This chapter looks at Galbraith’s famous discussion of ‘the conventional wisdom’, a phrase that has entered the realm of policy discourse and the general language. An argument is made that the notion of the conventional wisdom provides a crucial platform for the substantive contributions of The Affluent Society (AS). In this, as in so much else in the book, he builds on the directions laid down by John Maynard Keynes. Both economists searched for a language to persuade public and policymakers that the economic theory and policies of their day failed to address the emerging realities of the time. The conventional wisdom, Galbraith argues, is not overthrown by other ideas but by the remorseless accumulation of facts. This enduring truth has been amply tested by recent economic catastrophe – and the jury is still out.

The long 1970s was a difficult time for those promoting investment treaties and ISDS. OECD members had not adopted a multilateral convention, and the Global South was demanding a change in the rules of the game. The norm entrepreneurs’ self-confidence was decreasing. In this challenging context, the International Chamber of Commerce took the initiative and put forward a conception of foreign investor obligations consistent with investment treaties and ISDS. This move conceded little to the Global South: the best companions to strong foreign investor rights are weak or even voluntary investor obligations. For a while the outcome was uncertain, as different imaginations competed for the space of international investment law. This chapter examines some of these competitors, including the 1974 UN report on the impact of MNCs, the US position on the topic, and the 1974 UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.