WS31 – Companies

Workshop presentation

Since the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the 19th century and since the 20th century in China, with a 30-year interlude from 1949 to 1979, state-owned or private-owned companies have seemed to be the main actors in transformation and economic growth. Along with the speeding up of globalisation in the 1980s, the big transnational companies became the leaders, even if the salaried employees working directly for them represent only a small proportion of the working population. In China, the foreign-affiliated multinational companies have, since 1979, been the vanguard of modernisation by giving Chinese products access to the international markets and by quickly introducing new techniques and new management methods.

Many even perceive the big multinational companies as real powers that run the world. Caught up in competition experienced on the global scale and put under pressure by financial markets, the companies, for their part, see themselves as having much less autonomy and ability to choose than the rest of society perceives they have. But, whether or not their choices are constrained, they greatly determine our future, be it production methods, scientific and technical developments or products put on the market.

Winners in appearance, the companies that seek to be major sources of prosperity of societies are subject to increasingly sharp criticism and have lost much of their legitimacy over the last decade. In China as well as in Europe, the wealth of the new property-owning classes has shocked, and its moral justifications seem increasingly fragile.

Are companies – machines for producing and making a profit – the sources of prosperity for all, as economic theory claims? Their power grants company managers significant and unavoidable responsibilities with regards to the rest of society. Are they ready to take them on? Does the logic of businesses, often subject to the concerns of stockholders, guarantee the taking into account of the long term? Is the prosperity that results from the company’s activity, of course, and also from all its components and all its partners, fairly distributed between the parties? Are the sometimes tragic social consequences of decisions made by companies according to only their concerns, or of decisions that result in strategic errors whose responsibility belongs to the directors, really taken into account and punished fairly?

Companies and societies are experiencing all these issues, in different ways, in China and in Europe. For the last 10 years, the CSR (corporate social responsibility) system has been a reflection of these issues. How are companies evolving on both sides? What kind of role, governance, ethics and status to take on the responsibility that is theirs should they have in the future?

These questions will be central to this workshop.