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It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.> At which point in history was it not about exactly that?
Up until (at least) the 1960s. In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...