Enumerating Old Themes? Berle's Concept of Ownership and the Historical Development of English Company Law in Context

• Publication year: 2010
• Citation: Vol. 33 No. 04

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEWVolume 33, No. 4SUMMER 2010

Enumerating Old Themes? Berle's Concept of Ownership and the Historical Development of English Company Law in Context

Lorraine E. Talbot(fn*)

I. Introduction

Neither the claims of ownership nor those of control can stand against the paramount interests of the community. . . . It remains only for the claims of the community to be put forward with clarity and force.(fn1)

This radical statement encapsulates one of the key themes of Adolf Berle's work: stockholders no longer had a role in the corporation that entitled them to extensive claims in the corporation. Heralded in The Modern Corporation, his reconceptualization of the nature of ownership in the context of shareholding was based on empirical data on the massive level of share dispersal in America's largest corporations.(fn2) Stockholders had become too numerous and too dispersed to exercise control over "their" corporation. Instead, managers-the paid employees of the company-controlled the corporations. In this new arrangement, where business was dominated by management-controlled organizations as opposed to owner-controlled organizations-a shift dubbed by Berle as a "revolution"(fn3)-new guiding principles for corporations needed to be drawn. In this new corporate order the state was required to take the lead to achieve a morally correct balance of interests, a balance which relegated to the community both the longstanding interests of stockholders and the new control possessed by corporate managers.(fn4)

According to Berle in The Modern Corporation, these shifts in ownership and control meant that shareholder primacy models for the corporation were outdated: they were based on an outdated model of ownership and entitlement.(fn5) Shareholder ownership claims should no longer operate as the guiding force behind governance and corporate goals because the nature of that ownership had changed.(fn6) In the modern corporation, Berle argued, stock ownership had become a "passive" arrangement that was devoid of "spiritual values" and creative input. The owners were not able to directly employ their wealth and its value was dependent on outside forces.(fn7) Through such mechanisms as limited liability, the owners of stock, unlike the owners of tangible property such as land, bore little responsibility for their property. Correspondingly, owners of stock could not demand the extensive rights generally attributed to private property. Shareholder ownership claims were much more limited and were subject to wider community interest. Accordingly, shareholders were entitled to maintain the liquidity of their assets, protect their assets' unrestricted transferability, and have clear, accurate information on their assets' value-indeed, most of the protections suggested by Berle in his earlier Harvard Law Review piece.(fn8) However, shareholders' limited relationship and responsibility for their property correspondingly limited their claims. In other words, Berle attributed different normative values to different levels of ownership.

Thus, for Berle, when the large corporation separated ownership from control, "ownership" became a smaller bundle of legal rights that had an historical relationship with property rights but were not property rights themselves.(fn9) Stock property was, by its nature, more social than private and its owners could no longer claim private property-type rights. The normative values attributable to this level of property were small claims to modest returns after the claims of the community, particularly labour, had been met.

In the United Kingdom, this radical theme in Berle's work has been lost. Generally, Berle is cited as an early commentator on share dispersal and the resulting problem of director accountability. This emphasis is particularly misleading, as it gives the impression that Berle was concerned with re-empowering shareholders to act as a bulwark against management power and also enabling them to assert their proper claims as owners. However, while Berle probably maintained a lifelong ambivalence to management power,(fn10) it seems clear from his work in and after The Modern Corporation that he was not concerned with re-empowering shareholders. That ship had sailed and society was the better for it. So why has British scholarship, law, and policy been so blind to the radical theme of downgraded shareholder claims?

This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle's work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations' normative values-that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal-have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. Part II will provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Part III will address how the Bubble Act encouraged unincorporated businesses and shareholder primacy. Part IV will discuss the influence of unincorporated business concepts in the early Companies Acts. Finally, Part V will conclude: Berle theorized that the disconnect between shareholder and company resulted in low shareholder entitlement and a corresponding "un-owned-ness" of the company; he further theorized that this could be the basis for social reforms. However, this was not the outcome in Britain. Instead, share dispersal was not a sufficient condition for the reconceptualization of ownership in Britain, given the strength of the legal shareholder entitlement model. A future article will build upon this thesis and will show that this model was only challengeable given the set of wider social reforms introduced in the post-war period.

II. The Origins of English Corporate Law: An Overview

The rudimentary beginnings of company law can be traced to the seventeenth century. Before that time, incorporation did not originally designate a form that was particularly distinct from an unincorporated form.(fn11) Business associations were merely formed through different mechanisms, with some resulting in an incorporated association and some resulting in an unincorporated association. Incorporation was achieved through the grant of a charter by the crown(fn12) or, after the English revolution, by an Act of parliament.(fn13) Statutes were also used to extend the powers of the Royal prerogative so that they could grant charters with enhanced privileges.(fn14) Unincorporated associations, in contrast, were formed through differing levels of informal understandings. However, in terms of their post-formation characteristics, there were no significant differences between the two forms.

The first corporate form existed as a nexus of contracts and bore little resemblance to corporations as we know them today. Members of incorporated associations frequently made partnership arrangements between themselves, thus operating as unincorporated associations under the umbrella of a body corporate. For example, medieval guilds, which were associations of craftsmen in a particular trade, frequently sought incorporation in order to secure a monopoly over their trade. However, a guild's members would then often form unincorporated associations operating within the corporate body.(fn15) As early as the fourteenth century, merchant traders sought charters in order to secure monopoly trading rights. Like the medieval guilds, traders entered into agreements with each other as unincorporated merchant trading associations operating under the body corporate. The most famous among these charter companies was the East India Company.(fn16) The East India Company began trading in 1600 with a membership comprised of both sole traders and partnerships that invested in joint stock with joint liability that terminated upon the completion of a particular voyage.(fn17) By 1652, permanent joint stock was introduced, but this coexisted with private trading until 1692 when the latter practice was discontinued.(fn18) During this period the incorporated body had an identity,(fn19) the East India Company, but it acted as an umbrella for a number of different commercial arrangements between persons. Thus, unlike the modern company, it really did exist as a nexus of contracts.(fn20)

The Bubble Act of 1720(fn21) subsequently conceptualized the incorporated company as a more distinct form. However, by the time it had done so, incorporation had already lost its popularity. In its place, the unincorporated form dominated business. The marginalization of the incorporated form meant that when the legislature sought to make incorporations accessible to all shades of business through the Joint Stock Companies Registration Act of 1844(fn22) (1844 Act). The Act described the new registered company in terms which actually described the dominant unincorporated forms: the partnership and the Deed of Settlement Company.(fn23) These post-Bubble Act unincorporated forms were distinguishable from the incorporated forms of this period(fn24) in a number of key respects. First, both the partnership and the Deed of Settlement Company were private legal arrangements between individuals. They were not, like the companies incorporated by charters, concessions from...