Alexander Piatigorsky. Theoretical problems of corporate governance / / to the philosophy of corporate development: A Compilation. / Comp.: A. Alekseev, O. Genisaret - MA, "Europa", 2006. - 224.

Kirill Martynov

 

Weber and Marx, each in its own way, argued that capitalism gradually rejects the symbolic systems of the past, replacing them with cold calculation and pure rationality. Development of public relations in the XX century and analysis of real management practices shows that it is not. Capitalism as a system aimed at maximizing the economic profit, does not displace other (non-economic) forms of capital, but only in a certain way transforms them. System of accumulation of economic capital operate in close connection with the control of various types of symbolic capital. This means that one of the dominant forms of organization capital in the modern world - the corporation - may not be represent solely in economic terms.

Apparently, it is meaningless to describe the corporation, using the vocabulary of classical political economy: the corporation does not exist and can exist in an ideological vacuum. Therefore, we must now appeal to a new theory of the corporation, excluding the economic (and anyone else) reductionism. Variant of this theory is presented in the paper of M. Piatigorsky "Theoretical problems of corporate governance", affecting a wide range of issues that go beyond the application of management theory.

First of all, Piatigorsky outlines the specifics of corporate governance compared with the government, army and various forms of administration. Corporation - that is what is becoming, rather than something that is (in contrast to the classical administrative management systems); basic metaphor of "corporate state" is the concept of development. What is not developed, not implemented as a transgression can not be held corporation. Model of corporate governance, thus, can be compared with the model control the front during the fighting. Political jurisdiction corporation never fixed statically, while the construction of a rigid vertical management system within a corporation can not. The subject of management corporation essentially multiple, so that the influence and power do not have here the one and only source.

The main question is why corporate governance is not about who controls the corporation, but in how to manage the corporation. In this case, the subject of corporate governance is not the one who controls the other, but one who sets the direction of development and the challenges the corporation where other actors operate relatively autonomously. In other words, according Piatigorsky, the main task of the subject of corporate governance - is the formation of corporate symbolic space.

The Corporation exists in two dimensions. Firstly, it is the inner space of the corporation itself, and secondly, the external space in which the corporation entered into the existing relationship between the various political, administrative and economic subjects. By Piatigorsky, this is the ambivalent nature of corporations in general: on the one hand, the corporation has always focused on solving some of the inherent problems and issues, and on the other - is constantly striving to overcome its own limits. Accordingly, when we think of corporate governance, we must be aware of this dual focus of our possible solutions. Symbolic space, where control is implemented, essentially uniform, especially when there is a gap between political language the corporation and its external constraints (state, political parties, etc.).

Generally, the corporation is a kind of political subject willy-nilly. The policy of the corporation shall consist primarily to shy away from politics (understood here in the narrow sense, as a function of the state and political parties), but at the same time, external circumstances can push the corporation into a space policy decisions. Particularly politicians have shunned it, observes Pyatigorsk, where the corporation as a form of organization of space is a novelty, and therefore are perceived as potential competitors by the authorities. The increasing role of corporations in social life should not turn around strengthening their political ambitions, but "total political neutralization" of society (such is the forecast of Pyatigorsk in the XXI century). In this case, noting the lack of development of all forms of political life in Russia, Pyatigorsk proposes to make an open bid on a strategy of appealing to errors and failures in policy external to the corporate structures.

Referring to the outer space corporation, Piatigorsky notes, moreover, that the changes in international politics force us to rethink the very concept of international politics. With regard to corporate governance, this means that the traditional division between "domestic public policy" and "international politics" is gradually disappearing. Space corporation may not coincide with the administrative and public spaces, and then the corporation needs some effort to preserve a single corporate field in different external environments. Piatigorsky defines corporate governance as a political "non-local": the corporation does not lean to the political power in the region, nor the amount of political authorities. At the same time today, "global", despite all the talk about globalization, so far they have not taken shape, so to speak of the global space of corporate governance is premature.

A fundamental property of the corporation acts that each member does not have its own corporate status, but only refers to him by his involvement in the corporation as a whole. This means in particular that, historically, the modern corporation inherits the traditions of most urban shops and guilds than the national banking firms. Whatever it was, however, it is obvious that Russian capitalism has deep historical roots, and actually created from scratch, and this, in turn, makes the turn to the subject of ideology.

Here, according to Pyatigorsk, Russia today, repeating a gesture of ideological borrowing from the West, which took place about a hundred years ago. Then Russia "won" Marxism and the most consistently make it a reality. Today Russia with the same sequence realizes the situation of disintegration and fragmentation of the ideology that has a place in the West. In particular, this manifests itself in a radical domestic antihistoricism. Just as in the 20 years of the last century, argued that the old world collapsed, and began a new life, during the formation of post-Soviet state has been abandoned much of Russian history of the XX century. Piatigorsky diagnose this as a Russian version of the radical postistorizma. Negation of ideology, hypertrophic in Russian history of the last century, becomes, in turn, a kind of bargaining chip in the tradition of Russian absolutism of state power.

For corporate governance similar to the ideological situation means that its basic principles and forms of their implementation remain largely unclear. The weakness of Russian corporate governance, and corporations as such - a consequence of the weakness of domestic ideological context. Therefore, in the first place in the methodological analysis of the psychology out of Pyatigorsk. Actually it is about transforming the classical Leninist theory of revolution: the stagnation of the objective of the ideological space forces us to navigate the situation solely on the basis of a study of subjective psychological fluctuations.

Here, a curious aspect of the theory of Pyatigorsk is striving to take the opposition between economics and politics, but not due to a reduction of one of the concepts, but by changing our understanding of the basic concepts of political economy. For example, it is proposed to make a kind of linguistic turn in the interpretation of the concept of "competition", which is interpreted as a competition between different languages (including languages of corporate governance). Information (at least in part) the political economy of language and ideology in psychology, is likely to allow Pyatigorsk offer a fundamentally new dimension to the analysis of the concept of the corporation. Level of abstraction proposed in this analysis allows us to speak about the philosophy of corporate governance.

This philosophy assumes as its basic elements of the concept of space policy (management), language and subject. In this case, namely the consideration of the subject of corporate governance is the most difficult because of its principle of plurality.

Source: http://www.russ.ru/pole/Filosofiya-korporativnogo-upravleniya