The Theory of the Firm can be explained from one perspective with the erroneous theory that knowledge creation can be duplicated and redundant thus managers play an important role of making sure there are backup employees in case one gets sick, leaves, or otherwise fails.

We've needed corporations to aggregate work, because for example you don't build Mozilla Firefox with one programmer. You need a large team.

This is why I was working so hard on solving the Expression Problem for computer programming language (which I think I've solved and will be working on after I finish the crypto work), because with true modularity (no need to refactor), then programmers can work on their own smaller modules and then other programmers can combine modules into large programs. This is the Holy Grail of programming yet to be achieved.

In any case, the point is knowledge creation is becoming more autonomous, e.g. the 3D printer and 3D printer designs for download. You used to need a corporation to accomplish what you can now do individually.