Human-Asset Essentiality and Corporate Social Capital in a Stakeholders-Society Perspective

Abstract

It is well known that an important conceptual issue was first raised in a seminal debate between Dodd and Bearle in the early 1930s regarding whether the corporation is the property of the stockholders, or if the board should owe fiduciary duties to the stakeholders in general. To date it does not seem that this issue has been resolved. One view became more powerful and prevalent at one time, but then its influence relatively declined in response to public opinion, emergent economic environments and business landscape, particular events (such as the Asian financial crisis and the Enron scandal) and so on. Recently the stakeholders-society view seems to be somewhat regaining its momentum. There seems to be two important factors for this. One is the rising importance of human knowledge assets for corporate competitiveness in spite of, or rather because of, the development of digital information technology. The other is the rising public awareness of the values of natural environments which corporate activities are embedded in, as well as exert significant impacts on.