Business goodwill: relationships of production, legal superstructures and an administrative prerogative act developed in United Kingdom ideology and case law. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lilienthal, Gary
• Is Part Of: Commonwealth law bulletin. Volume 45:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 92
• Page End: 114
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Law -- Commonwealth countries -- Periodicals; 349.11241
• DOI: 10.1080/03050718.2019.1662319
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0718

Abstract

Abstract : Honey products company Comvita wrote off $20.1 million of goodwill in 2019, after the Chinese government's crackdown on the 'daigou' trade in branded Manuka honey. The research objective is to examine critically the meaning of business goodwill. Employers have managerial prerogatives. A prerogative, by its definition, has no basis in law. When employees develop filial-style relationships with customers, their employers realize for themselves a property called business goodwill. The research question asks how a filial relationship between the employee exercising work-related knowledge and a buyer enjoying the process of continuing to buy from the employee, can constellate as capital in the employer. Argument tries to show that business goodwill, as property, is a false articulation of the relations of production among people in the workplace. The research paradigm traverses both capitalist and socialist law, so that the article's research methodology conducts a meta-legal critical analysis. Goodwill is an ideologically based precept for state-controlled economic relations of production, by presenting goodwill rhetorically as property. The filial custom of relations of production developed between the workers and the customers are transferred to private businesses, by an administrative prerogative act abolishing the filial custom and replacing it with the state's dominant property ideology.