Heidegger's typology of entities and the very nature of the corporation

pp. 47-92

in: Dominik Heil, Ontological fundamentals for ethical management, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

The second chapter is dedicated to ascertaining the kind of entity that the corporation is. Heidegger distinguishes four fundamentally different types of entities: physical objects, non-human organisms, humans and works. All these types have been either implicitly or explicitly been used as metaphors to describe certain characteristics of corporations. Locating the corporation as a specific case of a work allows for certain views about the corporation to be exposed as metaphorical in the sense that they use an entity that the corporation is not in order to describe it. It furthermore also exposes views that were hitherto disguised as metaphors, but which actually describe existential features of the corporation and are thus not metaphorical statements, but literal statements.