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Show 170 of their commodity production. Whereas the previous chapter discussed how corporations such as the Southern Pacific Railway achieved legal subjectivity under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, this chapter takes our study of the corporate subject one step further by focusing on how corporate subjectivity is established within local communities. This chapter thus engages with the social, cultural, and environmental relations that have become manifest since railway companies demonstrated space and time are variables, rather than invariables, that can be managed to maximize the efficiency of capitalism. Raymond Williams was an ANT. In order to begin to understand how corporations have changed relations between country and city, and pick up where Raymond Williams and his contemporaries left off, this chapter moves from trains to communities to address how corporate subjectivity is established and maintained within societies that they inhabit. Realizing the presence of the communal corporate subject speaks to a growing consciousness within academic, public, and corporate circles of the importance of corporate social responsibility, which is broadly defined as the "idea that corporate activities should, at the very least, avoid disruption to the wider society and preferably generate positive effect" (Browne, 2013; see Carroll, 1999). Corporate social responsibility is obviously not a universal concept, because it is contingent upon the networks of relations developed between corporation, the law, and society, among other assemblages, such as culture and politics. These relations can vary on a broad spectrum. In some contexts, corporations have very few social relations with publics beyond the economic sphere created by their industrial involvement; in which case, these local communities may have very little community consciousness or rhetorical agency since their social networks may be very small or |
