Unlike Japan's keiretsu, which bound companies and their suppliers together with interlocking shareholdings, these firms are free to leave their alliances.
For instance, the first Agreement in 1961 for the Jarrahdale No. 1 mine simply required the mined area to be left tidy, the 1972 Agreement for the next mine site required the company to reafforest the area and prevent soil erosion, and later agreements bound the company to continuous research and monitoring to gauge the effectiveness of restoration techniques.
A few months ago, Joey watched solemnly as workers hauled out machinery from the Venus Trimming and Binding Company, just across the street, which was closing its Queens Plaza factory.
In fact, a series of big marketing alliances has bound food companies and television show producers like never before.
The cross shareholdings that once bound Japanese companies together and protected them from the attentions of unwanted suitors have largely been unwound, and foreign interest in buying up bits of corporate Japan is gathering pace.
Earlier on Friday, he said: "There is nothing in the employment contract of Stephen Hester or any director of Royal Bank of Scotland which binds the company or its remuneration committee to pay a mandatory bonus.
"It is an enforcement order that binds the company to clean up the community".
· Security People aren't going to save if it's still possible for company pensions to disappear in the event of insolvency - the government should bind companies to honouring pension schemes, or underwrite them itself.
The stakeholder group is a convenient concept to bind companies and persons together as stakeholders.
Whether it's Uber reinventing the transportation business, Instagram changing the nature of photography or Netflix disrupting video content, what binds these companies is they brought digital thinking to the very heart of their companies, not just bolted it onto the side.
The steamship Cambro, belonging to the Empire Shipping Company, bound from Huelva to Garston, struck on The Smalls, on the Pembrokeshire coast, on Saturday evening in a dense fog, and became a total wreck.
