Halo effect?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Halo effect?

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In The Bottom Line or Public Health, Wiist accepts the view that making money for its shareholders is the sole purpose of the corporation. Although a common belief, this is simply not true. And treating it as true makes meaningful government regulation more difficult and lets the managers and boards of directors off the public health hook in terms of their responsibilities. As John Kenneth Galbraith and others have accurately noted, corporations have many more stakeholders than their shareholders, including their customers, managers, employees, suppliers, and even society at large. Many corporations may act as if the only value they care about is their stock price, but there is nothing in the law or the theory of corporations that mandates this obsession with stock price and short-term financial gains. A private-public dichotomy that places corporations in the private sphere also cannot adequately account for the activities of corporations that are entirely owned by governments, such as global Chinese corporations and almost all oil companies, or transnational corporations that are largely owned by government-run investment funds.

There are also general characteristics of corporations that make them both especially powerful and potentially troublesome. First is our tendency to treat these entities like real people. In the USA this has most recently led to the Supreme Court affording corporations almost the same free speech rights as individual citizens. Second is the reason corporations were created in the first place: to provide investors with a place to invest money without risking everything they own. But even more important are the characteristics that make corporations different from people, specifically, potential immortality, and the ability to create an unlimited number of children (subsidiaries) and siblings (joint ventures). These characteristics turn out to be most important in the global sphere where transnational corporations can dictate to the governments that should regulate their activities. Although inanimate, corporations have paradoxically become the dominant life form on the planet. And this is why they are important to public health—not only to the health of global populations, but to the health of their customers, employees, suppliers, and the people living in areas affected by their activities.