FIRST CLASS

  SUMMARY


this was our first class and it was very interesting, at first the teacher explained the way we have to do this blog every week, end then we saw a movie called "the corporation". This movie talked about the history of the corporation and its first meanings given by experts. It said that at the beginning a corporation was an insignificant institution, imbued with a "personality" of pure self-interest, but in the next 100 years we saw the corporation's rise to dominance, it carries on a business, it is now part of our society, it has become a dominant social, economic and political force around the world. This documentary also examines the moral behaviors that are involved in the decisions that are taken on a corporation.

THE ROLE OF CORPORATION IN THE ACTUAL CONTEXT

As the documental “the corporation” says, today most of the corporations are only guided by the search of making profit; although it brings many benefits to the society it can also affect it in many ways. However some of this corporations are concerned about the impact they have in the economy, for example at the 2008 World Economic Forum, Bill Gates talked about “creative capitalism” that mean that profit generation and social welfare can go hand-in-hand, it is a school of thought that thinks business should not only decrease its negative impact on society, but it can develop solutions to social and environmental problems or at least help to distribute the benefits of the private sector more widely.

What happen today is that companies look always to increase their profits as much as they can and to decrease their expenses, this takes them to have negatives impacts on the population. For example, what companies do to lower the expenses is to look for cheaper labor and for this they go to countries that have very low life quality, and this people for this countries prefer to work for anything instead of starve. That makes that many times these corporations are violating human rights in an indirect way. Then, it is truth for corporations that “if work can be carried out more cheaply elsewhere with less environmental control, it will be carried out elsewhere. If work is carried out in one particular locality in preference over another, it is either because it is cheaper to do so than elsewhere, or there is wealth to be extracted from that particular area. Once either reason is no longer valid, that cheaper labor is available elsewhere or all the wealth and natural resources are exhausted, Big Business will move its capital to someplace else, leaving behind a devastated community and ruined environment.”

A corporation can be a bad thing when they become excessively large and wealthy, they can absolutely influence lives around the world, influence public policy and governments (like financing elections) and influence international institutions. This way, corporations do not really work with democracy because it is an obstacle of their principal objective (making profit).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.cceia.org/education/002/lessons/be/be-01-02

http://home.clara.net/heureka/gaia/global05.htm

http://www.globalissues.org/article/234/the-rise-of-corporations

http://www.unimelb.edu.au/community/docs/towngownspeech2005.pdf