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Reminding Corporations What They Are For

Edmund Burke, defending the “little platoons” of civil society against the leveling ambitions of revolutionary abstraction, would have found some to admire but little to recognize in the modern American corporation, an institution that has, in recent decades, developed an un-Burkean appetite for causes well beyond its charter. The Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative has taken up the overdue project of reminding corporate America what corporations are for.

The particular mechanism I want to focus on here is unglamorous: the shareholder proposal, that most procedural of instruments, filed and often quietly withdrawn once management gets the point. Heritage is, by virtue of its portfolio, a shareholder in a great many companies, and it has discovered what any student of institutions eventually learns: that influence exercised through patient engagement can be more durable than influence extracted through public confrontation.

Last proxy season, our initiative filed proposals at 26 companies; half were withdrawn, not because we lost interest but because the companies, upon inspection, either altered course or persuaded Heritage that no alteration was needed because the problem had already been remedied.

Consider Dell Technologies, which, in January 2026, found itself the subject of a proposal seeking transparency about its diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. Dialogue ensued. Then Dell confirmed that DEI metrics play no role in executive compensation, that hiring and promotion proceed on merit there rather than on racial or sexual arithmetic, and that its employee resource groups remain open to all comers—commitments the company has indicated........

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