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Comment by travmatt | Hacker News Reader

Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

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>> Also called social benefit corporations

Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

>> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

But Purism afaik does have them listed.

I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.

One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.

Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.

It's not robust, B Corp is mildly a defense against activist minority shareholders, and largely PR sham.

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