I have something of a follow-up to Haskell's earlier post. 

While companies like Wal-Mart will be open on Thanksgiving – a decision that has garnered no small amount of public criticism– others have conspicuously declared that they will be closed, in order to allow their employees to spend time with their families.

Now, you can call this a sincere commitment to employees' well-being if you like, but my cynical brain views this as a standard share value-maximizing decision – whether management has decided that adverse publicity would harm the brand, or that employees who get holidays off are less likely to agitate for higher wages, or that regulators are less likely to step in if the business makes some minimal concessions to employee welfare, it's still a decision that's about benefitting the bottom line.  If nothing else, it can be cast that way – which is precisely why, precisely as has been frequently argued on this blog, it's difficult to understand why the separate concept of a benefit corporation is necessary, except to the extent it represents the ultimate in marketing commitment.  Or maybe some corporate directors just don't want to have to come up with a shareholder-value-maximizing lie about the reasons for their decisions, even if it would be easy to do.

The Thanksgiving-holiday debate also fascinates me because of the way in which it calls to mind Hillary Sale's concept of corporate "publicness" – the idea that corporations, as large and powerful actors in society, are viewed as public institutions, and suffer when they fail to conduct their affairs with that understanding.  The corporations that have  declared that they will not be open on Thanksgiving seem to be responding to this "publicness" concept.

But that just raises the question, how much does "publicness" represent anything different than the types of pressures that have always existed to force corporations to behave as better corporate "citizens"?  Corporations have always had to fear that customers or employees would turn against them, or regulators would try to control them, if they did not behave appropriately; why are today's corporations any different?

Perhaps it's simply because modern corporations are too powerful to regulate via traditional mechanisms. Public shaming and appeals to (certian classes of) shareholders appear to be the only levers of control available – or, at the very least, in a world where it is expected that regulation is unnecessary, scrutiny of corporations as public actors is a natural response.  Mariana Pargendler argues that corporate governance has only arisen as an important issue in corporate theorizing as a result of the deregulatory bent of modern America – because there is no political appetite for direct regulation, people who would prefer direct regulation instead turn to corporate governance arguments as a second-best solution for controlling corporate behavior.

I suspect this is accurate.  Once upon a time, if we were concerned that workers were being unfairly pressured to work over the holidays, we might consider using direct regulation to remedy the problem.  Today, the idea seems extremely remote, if not utterly impossible.  Public shaming seems the only viable alternative, in hopes that either shareholders or customers will display enough distaste for corporate policies that managers decide to voluntarily reform.