I’ve been reading a book I picked up at a used bookstore called Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. It may take me a while to get through it all, as it’s not really on my reading list, and I just grabbed it as it appeals to my interest in social structures. But in the introductory argument for Organizational Theory as a field of study, there is an interesting passage that touches on one of my earlier posts about ownership.

We will fail to perceive the importance of organizations for our lives if we view them only as contexts– as arrangements influencing the activities of individual actors. Organizations must also be viewed as actors in their own right, as corporate persons, to use Coleman’s phrase (1974). They can take actions, utilize resources, enter into contracts, and own property. Coleman describes how these rights have gradually developed since the Middle Ages to the point where now it is accurate to speak of two kinds of persons– natural persons (such as you and me) and corporate or juristic persons (such as the Red Cross or General Motors). The social structure of the modern society can no longer be described accurately as consisting only of relations among natural persons; our understanding must be stretched to include as well those relations between natural and corporate persons, and between corporate and corporate persons.1 In short, we must come to “the recognition that the society has changed over the past few centuries in the verv structural elements of which it is composed” (Coleman, 1974: 13).