Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.

This chapter examines decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as emergent forms of software or knowledge commons, applying the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. It argues that DAOs, characterised by their reliance on blockchain-enabled smart contracts and elimination of hierarchical management, represent a novel form of collective decision-making and governance. The analysis distinguishes between on-chain and off-chain governance models, evaluating their effectiveness in ensuring decentralisation and addressing internal conflicts, with particular emphasis on the unique conflict resolution mechanisms available to DAOs (such as "forking" and "rage-quitting"). An important insight is that the rules-in-use in on-chain governance and off-chain governance are likely to be very different. The chapter also considers the robustness decentralised systems in managing common-pool resources.

The chapter explores the legal and transactional governance of venture capital (VC) from the viewpoint of the theory of the firm as a knowledge commons. At first sight, VC seems far removed from any notion of commons, if that is taken to mean a shared resource constituted by emergent rules of conduct based on interactions between multiple stakeholders. Bright line rules favouring the interests of capital holders over those of producers and communities dominate the orthodox legal account of VC, which stresses the importance of US-style transactional flexibility in managing investment risks. On closer inspection, however, VC ecosystems have many commons-like aspects, involving risk-sharing, information pooling, and the braiding of formal and informal rules. The public benefits of VC depend on the positive externalities generated by knowledge spillovers, which cannot be fully captured by private ordering. Understanding these features through Masahiko Aoki’s theory of the firm as embedded cognition, and drawing on interviews with mostly Europe-based VC funds, entrepreneurs and legal advisers, the chapter argues that the governance of VC should be concerned with maximising the net social return from innovation, taking into account the multiple interests involved in knowledge creation and preservation.

The inspiration for this volume is Simon Deakin’s proposal to think of the corporation as a shared resource which is collectively held and managed for the benefit of multiple interests. A small but fascinating recent literature extended this insight to mutuals, cooperatives, and benefit corporations, while an independent literature applied a similar line of Ostromian thinking to inter alia cities, land trusts, civil society organization, and certain kinds of platforms. All these studies noted the importance of shared knowledge, but none deployed the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. What this volume attempts to do is to steer the discussion toward this unifying framework. This chapter introduces the contributions, which despite their diversity engage with the idea that corporations and ecosystems comprising corporate actors cohere around shared knowledge, values, and other kinds of intellectual or cognitive resources, the sustainable production and reproduction of which depends on specific practices and rule configurations.

Financial companies are increasingly leveraging financial technology (fintech) to monopolize financial data, ostensibly to maximize profit for their clients and enhance their power in society. This trend both exposes the serious limitations of individual consent models of data protection and undermines the nature of financial data as a shared resource by excluding data contributors from its governance. This chapter posits that consumer associations, acting as data trusts, can play a crucial role in overseeing financial data-opolies while fostering the development of the community governance of data. Beyond addressing privacy harms, these associations can promote the attainment of important social goods, including the prevention of predatory and discriminatory lending and the expansion of access to financial capital. By leveraging and shaping both formal and informal rules-in-use that may facilitate these efforts, consumer data trusts can ultimately enhance the legitimacy of financial data commons. A discussion of BlackRock’s Aladdin platform and a European consumer association’s lawsuit against Meta illustrates the argument.

An idea at the centre of recent debates about corporate purpose and governance is the apparently intuitive notion that shareholders own corporations. Though misaligned with academic legal opinion, this notion is rooted in common sense and as such is often used, explicitly or implicitly, to close down discussions about the position of shareholders as regards other stakeholders and the social role of business corporations. The chapter analyses the power and persuasiveness of this common-sensical position through the lens of discourse analysis, aided by concepts drawn from pragma-linguistics and sociology. It shows how common sense can be shaped by primary definers in strategic action fields to promote ideological precepts, such as, in this case, the ideology of shareholder primacy. To understand how the field of corporate control is structured and how it has evolved, what is needed is a deeper investigation into how common sense is produced, shaped, and curated over time.

This single case study of INSTINCT3, a Germany-based video game influencer management agency, investigates how its employees (influencers) and external stakeholders (followers) operate as polycentric communities in two interconnected action arenas: an offline arena of intra-organizational interactions between employees, and an online arena in which influencer channels mediate interactions between influencers and followers. The study relies on the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework to examine the transfer of organizational values between offline and online communities. In-depth interviews are used to identify the resources, community attributes, and rules-in-use that are essential in developing a value-driven and responsible employee communityship. Additionally, the study investigates if and how organizationally relevant rules-in-use are transferred by influencers through communicative practices in their online communities to their followers. Relying on comparative analysis, it identifies how INSTINCT3 governs the two action arenas as part of a dynamic and multilayered process.

Human genetic information is best understood as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable social resource, making it well suited to commons-based governance as a complement to state- and market-led models. Using the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, the chapter shows the practical viability of such an approach, underscoring the importance of public cooperation, ethical safeguards, and consent. Yet the model faces a central dilemma: the need for broad data sharing to advance research versus the individual participant’s right to privacy. The chapter reframes this tension by conceptualizing privacy not as the negation of sharing but as one of its dimensions. It then resolves the dilemma by proposing a participatory, procedurally legitimate system in which stakeholders (including data contributors, researchers, and clinicians) collectively determine rules of access, use, and privacy through democratic deliberation. This approach moves beyond top-down declarations and instead establishes a self-governing genomic commons. A mutual benefit, procedurally democratic framework offers a promising path to realize the genome’s potential for public health while safeguarding individual rights.

Managing financially material climate risk requires reliable, decision-useful data, yet climate-related information remains fragmented and complex. Investor Climate Alliances (ICAs) have emerged as institutional responses, providing the infrastructure to produce, share, and interpret climate risk data across heterogeneous communities. Using the governing knowledge commons framework, this chapter examines ICAs as collective governance systems – institutions that coordinate knowledge production through formal rules, informal norms, and shared practices. Investor Climate Alliances demonstrate that complex knowledge resources can be generated collaboratively. In doing so, they illuminate the friction between collaborative knowledge governance and corporate law’s traditional paradigms which constrain investor collaboration.

This chapter proposes to recast the supply chain as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high-value-added crops like heirloom garlic, which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney. By foregrounding the practices of social learning and information sharing that is making this “circularity” possible, the chapter illustrates how creating a material commons often depends upon creating a knowledge commons to make it cohere, as well as upon creating commoner-subjects who will do the work of caring for both.