The corporate republic: Complex organizations and citizenship

Abstract

The twentieth century has been the century of the complex organization. The number of such organizations has risen at an explosive rate. Nowadays, more than half of th~ hundred largest economies in the world are not countries, but corporations. 1 Complex organizations have come to dominate the front pages of most serious newspapers and outnumber natural persons as participants in court cases (Coleman 1982, pp. 10-3; Bovens, 1998, pp. 14-5). They are strongly professionalized and bureaucratized; their size, complexity, and social importance is enormous (Coleman, 1990).