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

Recent controversies around ESG investing and “woke” capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, 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 realized 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 maximize 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.

General

Imprint:	W W Norton & Co Inc
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	February 2024
Authors:	Kyle Edward Williams
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Pages:	336
ISBN-13:	978-0-393-86723-7
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-393-86723-4
Barcode:	9780393867237

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