But at a time when many of us are looking to business to show leadership in addressing social and environmental challenges, The Corporation provides a sobering reminder of the underlying motivations that inform modern business behaviour. It’s best we take a look, engage with the arguments, and decide for ourselves.

A ‘CORPORATION’, according to Joel Bakan, professor of law at the University of British Columbia, is a psychopath. Through a “bizarre legal alchemy” corporations are vested with the rights and freedoms of a ‘person’ with the “defined mandate to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, their own self-interest”, regardless of the often harmful consequences (‘externalities’) they might cause to the environment or society – others “who have not consented to, nor played any role in, their decision making processes”.