Grammar Girl here, Aliza in Alaska recently asked whether she should use who or that

to refer to a board of directors.

So today we're going to decide whether companies are people or things.

In other words, whether you use the relative pronoun who or that when referring to an

entity like a company or a board of directors.

I had to look this up the first time someone asked.

For many years before I became Grammar Girl and had to answer people's questions, I

simply rewrote sentences to avoid having to figure this one out.

What confused me was that even though companies are entities, they're made up of people.

But it turns out that this somewhat confusing fact is actually one of the keys to knowing

which pronoun to use.

You see, a company, because it's just a legal entity, can't actually do much.

It's the company's people who typically take action.

So although you might often see it written that a company laid off 1,000 people, to be

precise it was actually the company's managers or directors who laid off all those people.

The board members might like you to think the big bad amorphous company was to blame, but

in the end it was the people who made it happen.

So instead of letting those managers hide behind a bad grammar, call them out, use proper

sentences like this one.

Today, the make-it-code directors, who just gave themselves a raise, laid off 1,000 factory

workers.

Similarly, you'd use the word they and not it to continue the paragraph.

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