Abstract
The report begins by presenting survey data collected by Professor Masaru Yoshimori in 1991, which highlights the differing corporate objectives between Anglo-American and Japanese-European business corporations. American and British corporate managers believe that a business corporation belongs solely to the shareholders and prioritize the maximization of the profits distributed to them. Japanese, German and French managers, on the other hand, believe that a business corporation does not belong solely to its shareholders and respect the autonomy of its organization consisting of employees and managers. Despite Professors Hansmann and Kraakman's declaration in 2000 that the corporate system around the world was converging towards a single model of maximizing shareholder interests, recent studies have shown that there still exists a large difference in corporate objectives between Anglo-American and Japanese-European corporate systems. This, however, raises a theoretical question. The US, UK, France, Germany and Japan are all capitalist societies based on the universal legal system of private property. Then, why do these apparently contradicting corporate systems continue to coexist within this universal framework of capitalism (and the private property system that underpins it)? This is the central question addressed in this report. A business corporation is a firm that becomes a corporation, and the report's main thesis is that it is the very legal concept of “corporation” that is responsible for their coexistence.
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