Tracing Corporate Forms Across Sectors

The purpose of the working paper is to showcase our comparative knowledge of a series of cases from the WP4 Corporate Form package in the COFFERS project. Our aim has been to trace corporate forms through the application of a typology, Global Wealth Chains. The typology of Global Wealth Chain types, and their combination, allows us to see how sectoral differences relate to different “transacted forms of capital operating multi-jurisdictionally for the purposes of wealth creation and protection” in the international political economy (Seabrooke and Wigan 2017: 2). We have justified the use of typologies rather than explicit causal theories earlier in the project (see the working paper COFFERS D4.3). This follows on two ambitions. The first is to provide a means to obtain new information about cases that permits knowledge from accounting, law, political science, sociology, and management studies to all be included in the building of cases, rather than to hold disciplinary assumptions for the purpose of theory testing. In this manner typology is deliberately an attempt to hold an artificial construct up against an empirical reality to see where things do and do not fit, and adjust accordingly (Weber 1978; Swedberg 2018). The second ambition is to trace corporate form knowing that the firm and the corporation are conceptually and legally distinct. While the firm is the ongoing concern, the corporation is the legal structure created to protect the firm (Robé 2011; Biondi 2017). As such tracing corporate form through typology is not about knowing the firm’s strategies but providing insights into how corporate structure is articulated. This includes the kind of relationships between clients, suppliers, and regulators, including whether they are functional and transactional or social, how complex they are, and what power dynamics are present between the entities involved.