Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Corporate Politics & Identity: Berlin's Holocaust Memorial & Degussa AG
Debates surrounding corporate identity and politics are often centered around a contestation of the essential nature of a company. As an entity (a 'person,' even) corporations are categorized and branded in ways that are surprisingly monolithic in expression and that fail to explore many nuances of possible identity politics. Much ink has been spillt on how best to articulate what corporations are insofar as they are accorded legal personality and the point of this scholarship has been to address how corporations might be conceived as persons. Taking the terminological as a given and using it to explore the plural identity of legal persons is a path toward a different approach to corporate identity: a way of beginning to ask the 'who' question of these companies.

In this paper, I plan to explore the ways in which corporate identity politics are more multi-faceted in nature and construction. I am particularly interested in how narrative approaches to pluralized identity might be brought to bear on the legal person to address both spatial and temporal (both synchronic and diachronic) aspects of identity. The specific nature of corporations as entities which exist in and through time (immemorial?) suggests that greater attention to be paid to this temporal effect on corporate identity, whilst considerations of the hyper-spatial possibilities of corporations bring to the fore questions of belonging and attachment.

As a way into the paper's argument, I propose to discuss the controversy surrounding the construction of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. In the autumn of 2003, construction was halted when it was revealed that a German company providing chemicals for the creation and protection of the concrete stelae for the memorial was affiliated with a company that had delivered the Zyklon-B cyanide tablets to the Nazis for use in the death camps' gas chambers. The project's oversight panel decided, in the end, to continue its contractual relationship with Degussa AG and recognized that the fact of being based in Germany forced them to deal with such "burdened companies." It is toward a better articulation of this "burden" that this paper strives.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I hypothesize that many state attorneys general run for higher office because they successfully exploit the policy making environment of their state. In this case, SAGs should run on strong consumer protection records when the environment favors it.