The defining characteristics of corporate capitalism are joint stock ownership, limited liability, and continuous legal identity. Corporations have legal rights similar to those of individual citizens of the United States. Yet corporate organization is closer to monarchy than to democracy, with management giving the orders and lower-level employees following them. Another defense of corporations is that they are controlled by the imperatives of the market, responding to changing consumer demands and adapting to new technologies. This argument understates corporate power and discretion.
Corporations seek to plan their operations and manage their environments.
They decide where to build factories, whom to employ, and what to research. The seemingly stable American corporate oligopolies of the 1950s and 1960s were shaken by global competition in the 1970s. Instead of responding in ways that created attractive new jobs or retrained the American workforce, corporations exercised their power in three ways that had damaging consequences for ordinary Americans. They went global, moving capital and production abroad and shifting the American economy from a manufacturing to a service emphasis that brought less secure and lower-paid employment. A common belief that labor unions serve as a control over corporate power rests on outdated images.