This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

This chapter explores the genesis, structure, and potential of the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs), a cornerstone of the Digital Services Act (DSA) aimed at regulating social media platforms. As a manifestation of Governance by Emulation, ODSs blend public law principles with private governance, emulating individual rights adjudication to hold platforms accountable. This chapter examines the political context behind their creation, tracing the EU’s regulatory evolution and the legislative battles that shaped Article 21 of the DSA. While hailed as innovative tools for ensuring accountability, ODSs face significant structural limitations, such as non-binding decisions, weak cost incentives, and a narrow enforcement focus. Nonetheless, they present a promising avenue for resolving disputes efficiently and experimenting with integrating large language models in decision-making. Early implementation highlights a mix of creativity and challenges, offering insights into the EU’s broader regulatory ambitions to administrify platform governance and set global standards. By analyzing ODSs’ hybrid institutional design and initial practices, this chapter illustrates their dual potential: advancing accountability while exposing the risks of emulating public law mechanisms in private contexts. It concludes by reflecting on ODSs’ role as Emulated Guardians and their implications for future governance of digital public spaces. European Union

The limited-liability corporation is a ubiquitous feature of modern life that many regard as morally neutral. Yet when we consult traditional ethical theories – such as deontology and virtue ethics – it seems that we cannot account for such leniency. The traditional theories namely imply that corporate bankruptcies are moral catastrophes in the sense that the owners and/or managers are allowed to escape responsibility and liability for their wrongdoings. In the present chapter, we seek to develop a theoretical explanation of people’s more lenient attitude. Our alternative view is that the ethical norms that are appropriate for attributing responsibility or liability in a market context are somewhat different from those that apply in other social contexts, such as the ordinary morality of civil life. This view is supported by our theory that the market is an ethically distinct part within an organic social whole, and conditional upon a social safety net that softens the excesses of market outcomes.

An idea at the centre of recent debates about corporate purpose and governance is the apparently intuitive notion that shareholders own corporations. Though misaligned with academic legal opinion, this notion is rooted in common sense and as such is often used, explicitly or implicitly, to close down discussions about the position of shareholders as regards other stakeholders and the social role of business corporations. The chapter analyses the power and persuasiveness of this common-sensical position through the lens of discourse analysis, aided by concepts drawn from pragma-linguistics and sociology. It shows how common sense can be shaped by primary definers in strategic action fields to promote ideological precepts, such as, in this case, the ideology of shareholder primacy. To understand how the field of corporate control is structured and how it has evolved, what is needed is a deeper investigation into how common sense is produced, shaped, and curated over time.

This chapter first discusses the main subjects of international law and explains their principal features. It then zooms in on states, the traditional and principal actors in the international legal system. It discusses the criteria for statehood under international law, the role that recognition plays in this respect, and how new states emerge. Finally, this chapter turns to an analysis of the right to self-determination, a notion that plays an important role in the creation of states and is considered to be the most prominent right of one of the subjects of international law: people.

In this chapter, we lay out the basic frame for studying innovation management. To do so, we are going to try to understand why innovation is important for society, for companies, and for individuals, and to do that we take our point of departure in the “urtext” of innovation research, namely Schumpeter’s work on Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and especially the notion of Creative Destruction. To follow that up, we are going to untangle how innovation management fits within a broader context of capitalism as an economic system, within a particular ideology, and within the operations of the modern corporation.

Conrad’s novels engage in a critique of imperialism, but the precise nature of that critique persists as a source of debate among scholars. This chapter argues that three of Conrad’s novels – Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory – level an increasingly sharp critique at a system of capitalism and imperialism based on the modern corporation. In the novels, an opposition develops between an idealized British model of family-based capitalism and a corporate capitalism corrupted by investor ownership. In this dichotomy, the novels associate the family-based system of capitalism with the positivity of material value, meaning, character, and emotion that stands in contrast to the utter waste – the “nothing” of Victory’s end – left in the wake of an invisible and ever-changing network of social relations temporarily connected within the speculative structure of investor ownership and the new imperialism.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

The chapter discusses the history of the Berlin housing system, the Kantian roots of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and the events leading to the emergence of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE). It explains the origins of the liberal notion of property and how corporate property is premised on ‘blasting the atom of property open’, that is, destroying the links between person and a thing that constitute classical liberal understanding of property.

This chapter examines the corporations power. Section 51(xx) of the Australian Constitution grants the Commonwealth Parliament power to make laws with respect to three types of corporations: foreign corporations, Australian trading corporations and Australian financial corporations. The umbrella term ‘constitutional corporations’ is sometimes used to refer to all three types of corporation.

Every Islamic waqf that adhered to its deed eventually became dysfunctional because of unanticipated changes in conditions. But not all waqfs were managed rigidly. Relaxed legal interpretations enabled waqf caretakers to depart, albeit within limits, from the founder’s instructions. But courts had the final say on whether a caretaker was complying with the deed and, insofar as he was not, whether his exceptions were justified. A judge could rule that the founder, were he alive, would have authorized certain changes that the deed did not explicitly allow. Alternatively, he could treat them as incompatible with the waqf’s spirit. He was thus the arbiter of what resource reallocations were legal. Unsurprisingly, this judicial privilege was abused. Judges commonly withheld permission for a managerial or financial adjustment until they were bribed. So central was the waqf to the region’s premodern economy that efforts to transgress its rules promoted a culture of corruption. Our primary interest here lies in the political consequences. In societies with rampant corruption, individuals tend to solve their problems with the state through bribery and reciprocal favors. They find personal solutions easier than trying to form coalitions with others facing similar challenges. Civil society suffers.

Among the requirements of a liberal order is the ability to pursue collective goals through enduring private organizations. Such organizations contribute to political checks and balances, which sustain individual freedoms. In the Islamic Middle East, a possible starting point for autonomous nonstate organizations was the Islamic waqf, a trust that an individual formed under Islamic law to provide designated social services in perpetuity. Waqfs came to control vast resources. They might have used their enormous wealth to constrain the state and advance the freedoms of their constituents. The resulting decentralization of power could have placed the Middle East on the road to liberalization and perhaps also democratization. However, despite their immense wealth, waqfs remained politically powerless. A key reason is that they were governed according to their deeds, not the preferences of their caretakers or beneficiaries. In these respects, Islamic waqfs differed from European corporations, which were self-governing organizations enjoying legal personhood. In the Middle East, waqfs supplied services that the corporation provided in Western Europe. For instance, whereas churches and universities operated as corporations, mosques and madrasas (Islamic colleges) were financed by waqfs. This institutional difference contributed to the interregional divergence in political patterns.