[governance] Ism or not Ism ?

[Paul Lehto]

On 8/17/10, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:

> For me what is significant about these organization is that they represent
> aspects of individual's participation. Just a government represent people in
> their identity as citizens, civil society represents people in their aspect
> as activists and those concerned with the myriad cil society concerns.  And
> commercial organizations represent people as employees and stockholders (and
> sometimes even te interests of the customers).

The same word "represent" is used above to denote freely elected
representatives in a demecracy as well as some [nebulous] relationship
whereby commercial organizations like corporations "represent"
*employees* and stockholders.

The use of the word "represent" in the context of corporations or
commercial organizations is just wrong.  Are we to believe that
employees in unionized workplaces are represented by the corporation,
and not the union?  Just who thinks their boss has all of their best
interests at heart?  In addition, there certainly isn't any
corporation that I'm a customer of that represents me...

The only way the authority to represent is transferred is in free and
fair elections.  Those may exist with governments but certainly don't
with corporations relative to their employees or even their managers,
in most cases.  Nor do corporations typically have shareholder
approval for their actions.

At bottom, a corporation speaks only for its Board of Directors and/or
top executive officers, but even then it doesn't "represent" even
these folks because the duty of the corporation is solely to make a
legal profit, not to look out for even the CEO per se.  The officers
and directors have legal duties to the corporation including a duty of
loyalty.  Is the corporation "representing" that loyalty duty?

A different word would seem absolutely required as between
'representing' in the democracy sense and in the corporate context.

I also do not understand how (assuming the above tripartite division
were valid) those persons who join civil society or corporations get
two or more representations while regular voters who don't join a
particular civil society group or work at a corporation get only one
representation.

If one person / one vote is changed to one interest / one vote, we can
expect that vested interests will win every time.
-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-2334
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