Ah. I didn’t intend to excuse the decisions of upper management when I said that. My intent was to counter the notion that a corporation and its workers can’t be analyzed independently.
A corporation is just a business formation, and businesses are made of individual people working for it. Those people’s motivations and efforts can, and often should, be evaluated separately from the decisions of management.
“Corporations are made up of people” is a strange way to excuse the reality that the ‘bad’ things that corporations do are often decided by top management.