Is the Xerox Corporation supervenient?

Supervenience is the view that the properties of some composite entity B are wholly fixed by the properties and relations of the items A of which it is composed (link, link). The transparency of glass supervenes upon the properties of the atoms of silicon and oxygen of which it is composed and their arrangement.

Can the same be said of a business firm like Xerox when we consider its constituents to be its employees, stakeholders, and other influential actors and their relations and actions? (Call that total field of factors S.) Or is it possible that exactly these actors at exactly the same time could have manifested a corporation with different characteristics?

Let's say the organizational properties we are interested in include internal organizational structure, innovativeness, market adaptability, and level of internal trust among employees. And S consists of the specific individuals and their properties and relations that make up the corporation at a given time. Could this same S have manifested with different properties for Xerox?

One thing is clear. If a highly similar group of individuals had been involved in the creation and development of Xerox, it is entirely possible that the organization would have been substantially different today. We could expect that contingent events and a high level of path dependency would have led to substantial differences in organization, functioning, and internal structure. So the company does not supervene upon a generic group of actors defined in terms of a certain set of beliefs, goals, and modes of decision making over the history of its founding and development. I have sometimes thought this path dependency itself if enough to refute supervenience.

But the claim of supervenience is not a temporal or diachronic claim, but instead a synchronic claim: the current features of structure, causal powers, functioning, etc., of the higher-level entity today are thought to be entirely fixed by the supervenience base (in this case, the particular individuals and their relations and actions). Putting the idea in terms of possible-world theory, there is no possible world in which exactly similar individuals in exactly similar states of relationship and action would underlie a business firm Xerox* which had properties different from the current Xerox firm.

One way in which this counterfactual might be true is if a property P of the corporation depended on the states of the agents plus something else -- say, the conductivity of copper in its pure state. In the real world W copper is highly conductive, while in W* copper is not-conductive. And in W*, let's suppose, Xerox has property P* rather than P. On this scenario Xerox does not supervene upon the states of the actors, since these states are identical in W and W*. This is because dependence on the conductivity of copper make a difference not reflected in a difference in the states of the actors. 

But this is a pretty hypothetical case. We would only be justified in thinking Xerox does not supervene on S if we had a credible candidate for another property that would make a difference, and I'm hard pressed to do so.  

There is another possible line of response for the hardcore supervenience advocate in this case. I've assumed the conductivity of copper makes a difference to the corporation without making a difference for the actors. But I suppose it might be maintained that this is impossible: only the states of the actors affect the corporation, since they constitute the corporation; so the scenario I describe is impossible. 

The upshot seems to be this: there is no way of resolving the question at the level of pure philosophy. The best we can do is to do concrete empirical work on the actual causal and organizational processes through which the properties of the whole are constituted through the actions and thoughts of the individuals who make it up.

But here is a deeper concern. What makes supervenience minimally plausible in the case of social entities is the insistence on synchronic dependence. But generally speaking, we are always interested in the diachronic behavior and evolution of a social entity. And here the idea of path dependence is more credible than the idea of moment-to-moment dependency on the "supervenience base". We might say that the property of "innovativeness" displayed by the Xerox Corporation at some periods in its history supervenes moment-to-moment on the actions and thoughts of its constituent individuals; but we might also say that this fact does not explain the higher-level property of innovativeness. Instead, some set of events in the past set the corporation on a path that favored innovation; this corporate culture or climate influenced the selection and behavior of the individuals who make it up; and the day-to-day behavior reflects both the path-dependent history of its higher-level properties and the current configuration of its parts.

(Thanks, Raphael van Riel, for your warm welcome to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen during my visit, and for the many stimulating conversations we had on the topics of supervenience, generativity, and functionalism.)