The impetus came from the organizing strategies of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which, with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, pioneered the analysis of the legal status of corporations as a driving force in the disempowerment of citizens within their communities.

In other words, a hundred or so years of legal precedents from the US Supreme Court have transferred the powers of decisionmaking traditionally thought of as residing in citizens hands. within their municipal corporations, into business corporate “citizen” hands.

The conflict and power imbalance plays out in communities when they attempt to stop harmful corporate activities from occurring within their borders – mountaintop coal removal, longwall mining, sludge dumping, big-box stores, etc. – and discover that they actually no longer have the authority to refuse such activities, because their refusal – as a human community – robs the corporation of its property rights, and in the weighing of self-governance rights on one side and property rights on the other, property rights prevail in U.S. courts.

I found Mintzberg’s article really interesting, because it appears as though at least the conceptual framework of the community self-governance movement and the cutting edge thinkers of the corporate governance field are converging.

Even their goals are the same: the communities CELDF works with are trying to create sustainable, livable futures for themselves by protecting their people from harms, and the corporations are also trying to survive in the present and thrive in the future.

The question will become whether the internal “community” of workers within corporations actually permits corporations to scale back and transform their physical activities so they can stop crushing regular communities in the normal course of doing business, or whether the changes corporations adopt in the coming years simply make them more effective at extracting resources, externalizing wastes, and crushing citizen democracy when people try to exercise it within the communities where they live.

I will go get this. Mintzberg is one of those prescient luminaries that never gets credit because he is figuring out and saying what the folks at the top want to prevent from coming true.

Red Hat, in my mind, has done a better job of embodying communityship than anyone else. Good work.

What if there was an index of companies that practiced this and over time we could see the financial impact of those embracing this important disruption.