The corporation is a modern fixture of contemporary capitalism. It can be hailed, on the one hand, as the historical motor of economic development and a structuring device of global wealth production (Chandler 1977, 1990). It can also be presented and vilipended as the source of all contemporary ills and evils – a power hungry bureaucratic monster (Perrow 2005), a profoundly psychopathic artificial individual (Bakan 2004) or a sprawling global octopus taking capitalist appropriation to new frontiers. In any case, the corporation has become one of those institutions that we, on the whole, tend to take for granted. [First paragraph]