Are joint-stock companies strictly private?

Abstract

Within the framework of a general theoretical questioning of the dominant model of large company and the monopoly of its system of government by the majority shareholders, the article firstly highlights the originally largely public nature of corporate companies preceding the current public limited companies (joint-stock companies), synthesizing its basic characteristics, which implied substantial privileges compared to normal companies and which responded to the objectives of general or public interest that justified their creation (and which constituted obligatory purposes for the maintenance of the privileges). After that, and given the increasingly problems that large corporations have been generating —largely due to these privileges, which make possible and encourage structural social irresponsibility—, the article highlights that a growing number of experts have been considering that it could be convenient in our time remember this character of exceptionally privileged companies, recovering to some extent a differential public control in their operation, so as to enable a more positive contribution to the general interest (for which the philosophy of voluntary social responsibility is clearly futile).