Questioning the Construct of Being "Corporate"

Recently, I learned that a colleague had been “let go” by his global corporate employer. A reorganization required a “reduction in force”! He was speechless, flooded and paralyzed by a cascade of emotions—chief among them disbelief, anger, disgust, and worry. During the virtual meeting in which his manager conveyed his termination, his remote access was disabled. In an instant he was locked out and left feeling abandoned, all alone in front of his laptop. While his termination came as a shock, it was, of course, well planned and “executed” according to state-of-the-art HR protocols.

What made this experience even worse was the irony that he worked in a function that promoted “belonging”. This focus was rooted in corporate values that featured ‘integrity’ and ‘respect for the individual’. Instantaneously, these values and pursuits seemed like a cruel joke. How can we profess “belonging” in a system where our participation is entirely contingent? … Contingent not even on our performance?

Instantaneously his consciousness was transformed from that of an “agent” to that of a “principal”—I am adapting here some classic terms from economics. It was as if a well-worn mask shattered on the ground only to reveal the fuller, more real person underneath.

I define “agent consciousness” as the one that we adopt and normalize in a specific role we assume as an employee of an organization. “Principal consciousness” is the one that leads us to seek employment and affiliation with an organization in the first place—our fundamental human “interests”, our and our family’s material and psychological safety, identity affirmation, status, belonging, and actualization of potential.

Part of the “agent consciousness” is the general absence of awareness of our underlying principal-ness. For good reasons. Maintaining “dual consciousness” would make us highly ineffective agents as we would be too often forced into moral and ethical dilemmas and double binds that are most difficult to reconcile. It is for this reason that many professions uphold dress codes and use other insignias that reinforce agent consciousness. The hope is that these costumes, disguises, and symbols nudge us into an institutional and “professional” behavioral code (or habitus) that enables the organization or institution to perform its function. Robes, wigs, hats, suits, uniforms, badges, color schemes, buildings and office space, etc. are all ways to become “vested”, i.e. embodiments of organizational roles and expectations (rather than being common people, i.e., principals).

Understandably, my colleague was angry at his boss, whose “I am so sorry”, “I wish there was anything I could do, but my hands are tied” and “let me know how I can help you” only felt hollow and made the experience worse. These statements were the boss's way of bridging the discomfort gap between “agent” and “principal” consciousness and feeling a little better about this agent-act he was obliged to “perform”.

Besides the personal crisis my colleague was thrown into, experiences like his raise a number of important anthropological questions:

• What does this capacity to act from agent and principal consciousness reveal about human behavior?
• Why does it so commonly escape our general awareness?
• How does this impact (enable or interfere) with the valiant goals to “humanize” the corporate workplace?

What does it mean to “be corporate”?

In leadership circles, we often ask how to be more human, more inclusive, more effective, and transformational. But we rarely ask a more fundamental question that underpins our answers: what does it mean to “be corporate”? Or, more precisely, what exactly is this container we call “corporate” and how does it structure our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?

We speak of “corporate culture,” “corporate responsibility,” or “corporate leadership” as if these were self-evident frames. But “corporate” is not simply a setting. It’s a cultural construction—a construct that has become a deeply influential way of organizing human activity that shapes behavior, relationships, identity, and even our definitions of value.

From Guild to Corporation: A Cultural Turn

Before the modern corporation, “business” was personal. In pre-industrial societies, commerce was rooted in family, kinship, and locality. Merchant networks like those of the Phoenicians, the Silk Road traders, or even medieval European guilds were embedded in broader social and spiritual frameworks. Wealth was often a means to social harmony or spiritual merit—not simply capital accumulation.

Leadership in these contexts was defined relationally. The leader was known by their proximity to others: as elder, patron, chief, or guide. Power was embedded in social responsibility.

Enter the corporation!

The modern corporate form, emerging in the 17th and 18th centuries (think: Dutch East India Company, British East India Company), introduced a new kind of being. The corporation was designed to abstract human intentions into a legal fiction. It could own property, accrue profits, survive its founders, and—crucially—shield individuals from liability. In effect, it institutionalized detachment.

This was the birth of a system where decision-making could be impersonal, profit-driven, and scalable. The leader became a manager of systems rather than a custodian of relationships.

The word “corporation” comes from the Latin corpus—“body.” To incorporate is to give form, presence, and agency to an otherwise abstract collection of people and purposes. To incorporate means to socially construct a body. A body that acts, speaks, defends, and competes. A body that may resemble a person, but is not a person.

In many ways, the corporation is an early form of artificial intelligence—a programmed, scalable entity that extends human agency, but without the embedded moral and emotional intelligence of the human beings who make it run.

This makes the corporation one of humanity’s most powerful constructs—a social technology. It allows humans to act at scale—across time zones, markets, even generations. It offers a legal “body” that can enter contracts, amass resources, produce goods, and adapt over centuries. In this sense, the corporate form enables extraordinary human agency, organizing effort and imagination far beyond the reach of any individual.

To understand and practice leadership today, we must first reckon with the culture of the corporation—not just as an economic formation, but as a way of structuring behavior, experiences, relationships, and societies—as a way of being.

The Cultural Logic of ‘Being Corporate’

This constructed body also comes with cultural limitations. Being corporate is associated within a cultural logic—an implicit pattern of reasoning based on beliefs, assumptions and value orientations that shape how agents interpret the world, make decisions, and structure actions. These include:

• Time is linear and measured—efficiency trumps ritual or reflection and structures relationships.
• Value is externalized—what matters is what can be monetized, scaled, or optimized.
• Emotion is tightly managed—the corporate self is expected to be composed, strategic, and aligned, with emotional expression controlled and confined to specific, limited ranges of emotional expressions.
• Hierarchy is institutionalized—leaders operate as nodes of task and outcome-oriented accountability more than as stewards of relationship or community.
• Ahistorical—the past is treated as data, not identity. Their memory is instrumental, not ancestral. This detachment allows for agility and reinvention, but also encourages a kind of cultural amnesia.
• Amoral by design—not immoral, but lacking moral position unless one is imposed. They are structured to pursue stated goals (typically growth or profit) with minimal concern for context unless consequences are enforced externally—by regulation, consumer pressure, or cultural backlash.
• Extractive systems—their primary function is to extract “value”—such as labor, natural resources, data, or capital—from people, communities, and the environment in order to generate higher-order-value and profit. In that sense they are not neutral entities producing goods or services, but rather as structures designed to maximize shareholder returns by systematically pulling resources from external sources, often without fully accounting for the social or ecological costs. In this view, extraction is not merely a byproduct but a core operational logic that is implicitly embedded in “corporate” behavior, values and relationships.

Of course, societal culture influences how the above are actualized. This leads to different ways of manifesting and expressing the shared corporate cultural logic in different geographies—a kind of diversity, albeit a rather limited one.

Implications for Leadership

These mostly implicit characteristics have profound implications for leadership:

• Individually and as a group, leaders within a corporate body may personally value justice, empathy, or sustainability—but find themselves constrained by a system optimized for efficiency or shareholder return.
• Organizations can become high-functioning and high-performing, but socially or environmentally destructive at the same time—not because of bad intent, but because of systemic misalignment with human and societal interests and/or values. They operate on implicit assumptions where undesirable consequences of their agency are externalized and the moral responsibility shifted to the public sector.

To lead humanely in a corporate context, then, requires constant ethical reinsertion and focus on re-humanizing systems that weren’t built to feel, do not have sentimental attachments, higher-order loyalties, or relational health and well-being as part of their cultural logic. Contrast this with other cultural models of leadership—tribal elders, spiritual guides, healers, communal facilitators—where presence, story, and embodied wisdom hold more weight.

When leaders are asked to “humanize” systems that were never human to begin with, they are challenged to bring ethical depth to structures that are ahistorical, amoral, and engineered for extraction. The tension is real—and it’s cultural. And, neither business schools nor prior experience adequately prepares leaders for this challenge.

Our modern understanding of leadership cannot be decoupled from the corporate construct. But, the aspiration to humanize it requires us to learn and import elements from these more ancient wisdom traditions to create new forms of human organizations to tackle human challenges of a different kind and scale. This requires cultivating awareness of the corporate construct that can severely constrain our imagination. And, it requires exercising and institutionalizing meta-reflectiveness.

When we evaluate or develop leaders without awareness of the corporate container, we risk exporting a one-size-fits-all model that erases context, discredits alternative leadership expressions, and perpetuates the very systems we claim to want to evolve.

Leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It emerges within specific cultural systems—and the corporate system is one of the most dominant, yet least interrogated, of them all.

To be corporate is to live inside a constructed body with extraordinary reach and deeply limited conscience. It is a cultural inheritance that enables human greatness and disconnection in equal measure.

So if we want to reimagine leadership, we must begin not with tools or traits—but with a clear-eyed understanding of the container we’re in.

After all, you can’t transform what you haven’t first seen.

Closing Thoughts

I know that none of these reflections are likely to help my colleague find a new corporate job. But perhaps reflecting on the deeper insights revealed through these types of experiences and events can be a stimulus for change - meta-reflexivity as Margaret Archer calls it.

Perhaps my friend—as a future corporate agent—can apply himself to the re-humanization of the particular system he will be joining. Perhaps he can work to deepen critical awareness of the corporate container he will be sharing with others. Perhaps he can galvanize collective effort to change and deepen the meaning of belonging and inclusiveness. Perhaps he will inspire a different type of leadership. Perhaps …

After all, what we can socially construct, we can also deconstruct and reconfigure to serve humanity at our existential crossroads. Perhaps this is the true calling of leadership today?

This article was originally published on LinkedIn as “Anthropologically speaking … We too often forget to question the ‘corporate’ construct” in May 2025.

About the Author

Joerg Schmitz is a business anthropologist passionate about exploring human behavior through the lens of anthropology and organizational culture. He is the founder and Managing Director of The Inclusive Leadership Institute (@TheInclusiveLeadershipInstitute). After 35 years living in the US and working with organizations and institutions globally, he currently resides in Bremen, Germany. Connect with him at [email protected] to continue the conversation.