A corporation is an economic and legal institution that establishes a business enterprise as a distinct legal entity separate from its owners, capable of owning property, entering contracts, and bearing legal liability in its own name, typically limiting the personal financial liability of its shareholders to their investment. The corporate form traces its institutional origins to medieval guilds, chartered trading companies such as the British and Dutch East India Companies, and municipal corporations, evolving into the modern joint-stock corporation that underpins large-scale capitalist enterprise. As a social institution, the corporation has reshaped the organization of large-scale production, ownership and economic power, and remains a central subject of study in economic sociology and organizational theory.
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A cartel is an agreement among otherwise independent corporations to coordinate prices, output or market division rather than compete.
Perrow Normal Accidents examined how complex, tightly coupled corporate and industrial organizations produce accidents that are built into the system itself.
The chartered company was an early form of the modern business corporation, granted its legal personality and privileges directly by a sovereign charter.
Bell The Coming of Post-Industrial Society theorized a shift from goods-producing corporations toward knowledge- and service-based economic institutions.
Castells network society theory examined how corporations and states reorganize production and power around global information networks.
Mizruchi studied interlocking corporate directorates, tracing how shared board memberships coordinate the American corporate elite.
Fligstein architecture of markets research examined how large corporations build stable fields of competition through political and organizational strategy, not price competition alone.
DiMaggio, with Walter Powell, theorized institutional isomorphism, explaining why corporations and other organizations in a field grow similar in structure over time.
Modern plutocracy is frequently analyzed in relation to the concentrated wealth and political influence of the corporation, the dominant institutional vehicle for accumulating large private fortunes.
Burt structural holes theory showed how a corporate actor position bridging otherwise disconnected networks confers informational and strategic advantage.
Sassen global city thesis showed how multinational corporate and financial functions concentrate command and control capacities in a small set of world cities.
The stock exchange is the institutional marketplace through which shares of the corporation, itself an institution of pooled and transferable ownership, are bought and sold.
Scott institutional theory of organizations analyzed how regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive institutions shape corporate and other organizational behavior.
Powell, with Paul DiMaggio, identified coercive, mimetic and normative pressures that push corporations within the same organizational field to resemble one another.
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