Everyone has values which conflict with the sheer maximization of profit. When those conflicts occur, virtually no one will consistently choose profit over conflicting values, especially when the potential profit is small or conflicts with other economic values, promoting the common good or preserving a functioning ecosphere. This Article explores a multi-stakeholder approach that will increase the quantum of humanity in the governance of American large public companies in the era of social media and online communication. We dub this crowd-based strategy of steering public corporations “total governance.” Total governance recognizes that individuals can engage with public corporations from multiple angles, as investors, employees, online activists, community members, and consumers. While we often think in terms of monolithic roles, imputing interests to shareholders, for example, on the assumption that shareholders are only shareholders, this is never true. Every shareholder, whether human or institutional, also inhabits other roles and has other interests and values. Moreover, role-players can ally with other role-players with the same or different stakes in the firm to participate in the governance of the corporation. The diffusion of technologies and social media, facilitating online communications on a global scale, enables coordination and stakeholder coalitions. As digitally native Millennials and GenZ’ers move into positions of influence, the system of passive and disenfranchised human stakeholders is about to change. Human stakeholders of different categories can act collectively to pursue and promote values that resonate with them as shareholders, employees, customers, members of communities, or inhabitants of a shared planet. As human shareholders join forces with employees, consumers or others, they will overcome the two key myths of traditional taxonomy of stakeholders’ interests. First, we often assume that the interests of individuals in a corporation’s performance and practices depend solely on the type of stake that they have in a corporation. According to this myth, shareholders have a monolithic interest as shareholders, generally assumed to be maximization of the economic value of their investment. But human shareholders hold and rank numerous values that speak to their human nature: some shareholders are prosocial, some are greedy, some prioritize the environment, some care more about social justice.

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