The corporation (and for many, the capitalist or market system in general) bears many of the characteristics of what has already been described. It is modernist - its rules are the only rules, and its description of reality the only one. It is bureaucratic. It is positivistic, in a sense - all that matters is the observable reality of the transfer of goods and services. And, it is a kind of technophilia, believing that the good of human society comes through acquisition and the next "technical fix". Watch any commercial if you don't believe this.
The corporate world is not the same as the market. You can have markets without corporations. Corporations are particular kinds of actors within the market, not the same as individuals, and not the same as small businesses. While the interests of the individual extend beyond the economic, and small businesses can be extensions of an individual's multiple interests, the same is not true of the corporation. As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued, in the title of a popular essay he wrote in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits" (New York Times Magazine, Sept. 13, 1970). He puts it succintly in that essay:
"there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."
This argument works very well as long as one assumes that all actors within the marketplace are the same as the corporation in motivations and abilities. But this is not true - the interests of the individual may well be outside the range of interests that shareholders regard as significant. And, the power of corporations is such that the terms of reference for the market become the terms of reference that the corporations set. There is, in other words, no exchange between equals. The individual encountering the corporation in the market setting is dealt with as part of the "public", an aggregate that necessarily cannot deal with real difference or individuality. In the need to maximize profits, those who deal with corporations must subsume their interests to the assumption that the corporation makes about their public.
There is a corporate answer to this: competition. If a corporation does not provide what the individual needs, the individual will spend money elsewhere, and the corporation will have to change its strategy or die. Unfortunately, that assumes a relatively simple market, in which competition easily and quickly works itself out. It is a model that works well in a market that has many smaller businesses. It works less and less the larger the corporation becomes. And, once the corporation becomes multinational and can effectively move outside of national restrictions on its actions ("staying within the rules of the game", as Friedman says above), the idea of competition becomes a 19th century story, true in part but vastly oversimplified. There are just too many ways around real competition, even in a free trade situation (take, for example, the actions of the US as it consistently ignores WTO rulings when they are not in their interests, e.g., softwood lumber trade with Canada).
Part of the problem with corporatism is its extent. We know this as globalization, and many people protest against it. It should be said that there are humane arguments for globalization - that it provides jobs for people in other countries that pay better than anything else they could get, that it raises standards of living, that it provides goods to people who otherwise wouldn't have them, that it ultimately democratizes by showing people what life is like elsewhere.
But there are plenty of arguments against as well. Many argue that corporations have no responsibility to any local government, or if they do (through contracts or treaties) it is to an elite which may be willing to sell its people to become personally rich. While people might have a job that pays better, it may be at environmental or health price which is unsustainable. It destroys local businesses in the same way that introducing a new predator species in an ecosystem can destroy the ecosystem. It homogenizes a view of the world, such that everything looks like Disney and tastes like McDonalds. It forces changes in local culture at an unsustainable rate. It forces countries to adopt economic systems that have not had a chance to evolve locally, and end up impoverishing many people. And, the corporations have no moral or legal commitment to an area, so that once they have taken what they need, they move on and the local people are left with little or nothing.
The corporation, then, like the instruments of mass society, dehumanize, according to critical theorists. What is particularly insidious is that they use the images and codes of human society to do it. They look and seem like your friend, with your interests at heart, when in fact they do not, and cannot. Their human face comes from the humans within them, borrowed from their workers. It is, however, a deception. The corporation must use those faces to convince you that their goals and yours coincide. They do not.
It is important to understand what I mean here. When I say that their goals and yours do not coincide, I do not mean that they never coincide. Of course, they do sometimes. Nor am I saying that there's something tangible that could not be commodified and marketed. Anything can be commodified. But the act of commodification itself draws us away from the embodied human realm. We make sense out of the world by living in it, and our meanings originate in that lived bodily experience of the world. Corporations, on the other hand, do not. They are abstract, even though they contain and are run by people, because they have to deal with aggregates (the "public").
This does not mean that we should get rid of corporations, but rather that we should recognize them for what they are - aliens. They are non-human persons. As an individual, you cannot assume that they hold the same interests, the same conception of ethics, the same goals or commitments as you.
This also does not mean that we should get rid of markets - as I argued earlier, corporations are actors within markets, not markets themselves. It should be said, though, that the market is a metaphor of human existence, and an incomplete one at that. We are actors within markets, to be sure, but we are also other things not easily captured by the market metaphor. We could force the market metaphor to cover all human experience, but in the forcing, much of what matters about being human would be lost.
That is the problem that critical theory has - the reduction of human significance to a single metaphor.