Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation

di Kyle Edward Williams (Autore)

WW Norton & Co, 2024

Recent controversies around ESG investing and “woke” capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By the twentieth century, in fact, the notion that business leaders could benefit society had become a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history shows, New Deal liberalism realised a kind of big business supervision narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become orthodoxy: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to seatbelts to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximise value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, “stakeholder capitalism”, still dominates our headlines today. Williams’s necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.

• Autore: Kyle Edward Williams
• Editore: WW Norton & Co
• Anno: 2024
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Pagine: 304 p.
• Dimensioni: 236 x 160 mm
• Peso: 534 gr.
• EAN: 9780393867237

Testo in English