An evil corporation is a trope in popular culture that portrays a corporation as ignoring social responsibility, morality, ethics, and sometimes laws in order to make profit for its shareholders. [1] In rare cases, the corporation may be well intentioned but extremist, engaging in noble cause corruption.
The notion is "deeply embedded in the landscape of contemporary culture—populating films, novels, videogames, and more." The science fiction genre served as the initial background to portray corporations in this dystopian light. [1]
Evil corporations can be seen to represent the danger of combining capitalism with larger hubris. [2]
Some notable uses of the trope include Arasaka Corporation in the Cyberpunk franchise, Atlas Corporation in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare , Weyland-Yutani in the Alien franchise, InGen in the Jurassic Park franchise, Resources Development Administration in the Avatar franchise, Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil, East India Trading Company in Pirates of the Caribbean, and E-Corp in Mr. Robot .
Some real-world corporations have been accused of being evil. To guard against such accusations, Google once adopted the official motto "Don't be evil", although whether it was ever truly followed was a matter of debate - critics accused the company of "evil" acts such as secret data collection and violating customers' privacy, and political bias. [1] [3] The motto was eventually moved to the very end of its code of conduct, then removed entirely. [4] The New Yorker wrote that "many food activists consider Monsanto (which later merged with Bayer) to be the definitively evil corporation". [5]
The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility wrote, "For many consumers, Wal-Mart serves as the evil corporation prototype, but record numbers shop at the stores for low prices." [6]
In Japan, a committee of journalists and rights activists issues an annual "corporate raspberry award" known as Most Evil Corporation of the Year Award (also called the Black Company Award) to a company "with a culture of overwork, discrimination and harassment". [7]
After the shooting of Brian Thompson in December 2024, many Americans took to social media to express their outrage against health insurance companies and the American healthcare system overall - often using terms associated with the trope to describe aformentioned corporations. [8] [9] [10] [11]
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Corporatocracy or corpocracy is an economic, political and judicial system controlled or influenced by business corporations or corporate interests.
In criminology, corporate crime refers to crimes committed either by a corporation, or by individuals acting on behalf of a corporation or other business entity. For the worst corporate crimes, corporations may face judicial dissolution, sometimes called the "corporate death penalty", which is a legal procedure in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or cease to exist.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social impact is a form of international private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in, with, or supporting professional service volunteering through pro bono programs, community development, administering monetary grants to non-profit organizations for the public benefit, or to conduct ethically oriented business and investment practices. While once it was possible to describe CSR as an internal organizational policy or a corporate ethic strategy similar to what is now known today as Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG); that time has passed as various companies have pledged to go beyond that or have been mandated or incentivized by governments to have a better impact on the surrounding community. In addition, national and international standards, laws, and business models have been developed to facilitate and incentivize this phenomenon. Various organizations have used their authority to push it beyond individual or industry-wide initiatives. In contrast, it has been considered a form of corporate self-regulation for some time, over the last decade or so it has moved considerably from voluntary decisions at the level of individual organizations to mandatory schemes at regional, national, and international levels. Moreover, scholars and firms are using the term "creating shared value", an extension of corporate social responsibility, to explain ways of doing business in a socially responsible way while making profits.
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan and filmmaker Harold Crooks, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern corporation. Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power during the filming of the documentary.
Megacorporation, mega-corporation, or megacorp, a term originally coined by Alfred Eichner in his book The Megacorp and Oligopoly: Micro Foundations of Macro Dynamics but popularized by William Gibson, derives from the combination of the prefix mega- with the word corporation. It has become widespread in cyberpunk literature. It is synonymous with syndicate, globalist- or transnational capital. It refers to a corporation that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets. Megacorps are so powerful that they are above the government laws, possess their own heavily armed private armies, are operators of privatized police forces, hold "sovereign" territory, and even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of "corporate culture" to an extreme.
This is an index of sociology articles. For a shorter list, see List of basic sociology topics.
Markel Group Inc. is a group of companies headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, and originally founded in 1930 as an insurance company.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business:
Regions Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company headquartered in the Regions Center in Birmingham, Alabama. The company provides retail and commercial banking, trust, stock brokerage, and mortgage services. Its banking subsidiary, Regions Bank, operates about 2,000 automated teller machines and 1,300 branches in 15 states in the Southern and Midwestern United States.
The Conference Board, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit business membership and research organization. It counts over 1,000 public and private corporations and other organizations as members, encompassing 60 countries.
Fred Hassan, is a Pakistan-born American business executive who works for the private equity giant Warburg Pincus and previously was CEO of three global pharmaceutical companies.
Robert B. Shapiro is an American businessman and attorney who has worked extensively with the biochemical corporations G. D. Searle & Company and Monsanto. Before working in this sector he was Vice-President and legal counsel at General Instrument from 1972 to 1979. His father, Moses, was Chairman of this company from 1969 to 1975.
RoboCop is an American cyberpunk action media franchise featuring the futuristic adventures of Alex Murphy, a Detroit, Michigan police officer, who is fatally wounded in the line of duty and transformed into a powerful cyborg, brand-named RoboCop, at the behest of a powerful mega-corporation, Omni Consumer Products. Thus equipped, Murphy battles both violent crime in a severely decayed city and the blatantly corrupt machinations within OCP.
The Climate Corporation is a digital agriculture company that examines weather, soil and field data to help farmers determine potential yield-limiting factors in their fields.
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, consumers, suppliers, communities and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
In business, a B Corporation is a for-profit corporation certified for its social impact by B Lab, a global non-profit organization. To be granted and to maintain certification, companies must receive a minimum score of 80 from an assessment of its social and environmental performance, integrate B Corp commitments to stakeholders into company governing documents, and pay an annual fee based on annual sales. Companies must re-certify every three years to retain B Corporation status.
Joseph Robert Swedish is an American healthcare executive and leader. He is a former senior adviser to the board of directors at Anthem, Inc., a Fortune 29 company, and was the CEO of Anthem, Inc. from 2013 to 2017. For 12 years in a row Swedish was named Modern Healthcare’s one of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (ISBN 0-307-26561-7) is a book written by Robert Reich and published by New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf in 2007. Reich was President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| Outline | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subgenres |
| ||||||||||||||
| Culture |
| ||||||||||||||
| Media |
| ||||||||||||||
| Themes |
| ||||||||||||||
| Related | |||||||||||||||
