This book is the product of over 20 years of company law teaching, both at graduate
and at undergraduate level. During this time, I have found that the current
approaches for analysing company law are useful for some purposes but fall short
for others. I took a sabbatical in 2015 to investigate an alternative model, real entity
theory, which dominated company law scholarship into the first half of the 20th
century. Real entity theorists at that time based their work on intuition. The study of
organizations and human behaviour in organizational contexts had just started with
contributors such as Frederick Winslow Taylor writing about optimizing production
processes. Unfortunately, real entity theory started to wane in legal circles at about
the same time as the study of organizations began to emerge in other social sciences.
Today, we benefit from a rich body of contributions analysing and explaining how social
forces shape organizational action and individual actions within organizations.
This book relies on these contributions to advance a modern version of a real entity
theory of company law.