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Advocacy after Bhopal
Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
Kim Fortun
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground.

Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."
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Banking for a Better World
Nanno Kleiterp in Conversation with Marijn Wiersma
Nanno Kleiterp
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
When we look at all the challenges facing the world, including inequality, population migration, and climate change, we can see a role for development banking in nearly all of them. But will that role be played for good or ill? This book brings together two people who collectively draw on their forty-five years of experience in that world to argue that development banking can-and must-play a constructive role. We only need to read the news to find public outrage at tales of short-sighted greed in the financial world. But what happens when banks invest in long-term sustainability? Readers will find a fascinating example in the journey of the Dutch development bank FMO. At times global in perspective, at other moments intimately personal, Banking for a Better World interweaves candid anecdotes with development history, as well as banking lessons with client interviews, to deliver a powerful argument for a business model that generates profit through impact, and impact through profit. This is an important and accessible must-read for anyone involved in banking, business, policy making, and civil society as a whole. Banking for a Better World challenges us to start finding overlaps between our own lives and global issues and to bridge the distance between our personal needs and those of our planet.
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Beyond the Boycott
Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism
Gay W. Seidman
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
As the world economy becomes increasingly integrated, companies can shift production to wherever wages are lowest and unions weakest. How can workers defend their rights in an era of mobile capital? With national governments forced to compete for foreign investment by rolling back legal protections for workers, fair trade advocates are enlisting consumers to put market pressure on companies to treat their workers fairly. In Beyond the Boycott, sociologist Gay Seidman asks whether this non-governmental approach can reverse the "race to the bottom" in global labor standards. Beyond the Boycott examines three campaigns in which activists successfully used the threat of a consumer boycott to pressure companies to accept voluntary codes of conduct and independent monitoring of  work sites. The voluntary Sullivan Code required American corporations operating in apartheid-era South Africa to improve treatment of their workers;  in India, the Rugmark inspection team provides 'social labels' for  handknotted carpets made without child labor; and in Guatemala,  COVERCO monitors conditions in factories producing clothing under contract for major American brands. Seidman compares these cases to explore the ingredients of successful campaigns, as well as the inherent limitations facing voluntary monitoring schemes. Despite activists' emphasis on educating individual consumers to support ethical companies, Seidman finds that, in practice, they have been most successful when they mobilized institutions—such as universities, churches, and shareholder organizations. Moreover, although activists tend to dismiss states' capabilities, all three cases involved governmental threats of trade sanctions against companies and countries with poor labor records. Finally, Seidman  points to an intractable difficulty of independent workplace monitoring: since consumers rarely distinguish between monitoring schemes and labels, companies can hand pick monitoring organizations, selecting those with the lowest standards for working conditions and the least aggressive inspections. Transnational consumer movements can increase the bargaining power of the global workforce, Seidman argues, but they cannot replace national governments or local campaigns to expand the meaning of citizenship. As trade and capital move across borders in growing volume and with greater speed, civil society and human rights movements are also becoming more global. Highly original and thought-provoking, Beyond the Boycott vividly depicts the contemporary movement to humanize globalization—its present and its possible future. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed
Edward C. Lorenz
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A thought-provoking investigation of an urgent issue facing American communities today, Edward C. Lorenz’s book examines the intersection of corporate irresponsibility and civic engagement. At the heart of this case study is a group of firms responsible for seven of the most contaminated Superfund sites in the United States, the largest food contamination accident in U.S. history, stunning stock and financial manipulations, and a massive shift of jobs off shore. In the face of these egregious environmental, employee, and investor abuses, several communities impacted by these firms organized to confront and combat failures in corporate and bureaucratic leadership, winning notable victories over major financiers, lobbyists, and indifferent or ineffective government agencies. A critical analysis of public and private leadership, business and economic ethics, and civic life, this book concludes with a stirring blueprint for other communities facing similarly overwhelming opposition.

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Corporate Social Responsibility?
Human Rights in the New Global Economy
Edited by Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly
University of Chicago Press, 2015
With this book, Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly have assembled an essential toolkit to better understand how the notoriously ambiguous concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions in practice within different disciplines and settings. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from leading figures in human rights programs around the United States, they vigorously engage some of the major political questions of our age: what is CSR, and how might it render positive political change in the real world?
           
The book examines the diverse approaches to CSR, with a particular focus on how those approaches are siloed within discrete disciplines such as business, law, the social sciences, and human rights. Bridging these disciplines and addressing and critiquing all the conceptual domains of CSR, the book also explores how CSR silos develop as a function of the competition between different interests. Ultimately, the contributors show that CSR actions across all arenas of power are interdependent, continually in dialogue, and mutually constituted. Organizing a diverse range of viewpoints, this book offers a much-needed synthesis of a crucial element of today’s globalized world and asks how businesses can, through their actions, make it better for everyone. 
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Corporation 2020
Transforming Business for Tomorrow's World
Pavan Sukhdev
Island Press, 2012
There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today’s market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. Around $1 trillion a year in perverse subsidies and barriers to entry for alternative products maintain “business-as-usual” while obscuring their associated environmental and societal costs. The result is the broken system of social inequity, environmental degradation, and political manipulation that marks today’s corporations.
 
We aren’t stuck with this dysfunctional corporate model, but business needs a new DNA if it is to enact the comprehensive approach we need. Pavan Sukhdev lays out a sweeping new vision for tomorrow’s corporation: one that will increase human wellbeing and social equity, decrease environmental risks and ecological losses, and still generate profit. Through a combination of internal changes in corporate governance and external regulations and policies, Corporation 2020 can become a reality in the next decade—and it must, argues Sukhdev, if we are to avert catastrophic social imbalance and ecological harm.
 
Corporation 2020 presents new approaches to measuring the true costs of business and the corporation’s obligation to society. From his insightful look into the history of the corporation to his thoughtful discussion of the steps needed to craft a better corporate model, Sukhdev offers a hopeful vision for the role of business in shaping a more equitable, sustainable future.
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Deeply Responsible Business
A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership
Geoffrey Jones
Harvard University Press, 2023

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.

For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.

He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.

As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.

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The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite
Mark S. Mizruchi
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the aftermath of a financial crisis marked by bank-friendly bailouts and loosening campaign finance restrictions, a chorus of critics warns that business leaders have too much influence over American politics. Mark Mizruchi worries about the ways they exert too little. The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite advances the surprising argument that American CEOs, seemingly more powerful today than ever, have abrogated the key leadership role they once played in addressing national challenges, with grave consequences for American society.

Following World War II, American business leaders observed an ethic of civic responsibility and enlightened self-interest. Steering a course of moderation and pragmatism, they accepted the legitimacy of organized labor and federal regulation of the economy and offered support, sometimes actively, as Congress passed legislation to build the interstate highway system, reduce discrimination in hiring, and provide a safety net for the elderly and needy. In the 1970s, however, faced with inflation, foreign competition, and growing public criticism, corporate leaders became increasingly confrontational with labor and government. As they succeeded in taming their opponents, business leaders paradoxically undermined their ability to act collectively. The acquisition wave of the 1980s created further pressures to focus on shareholder value and short-term gain rather than long-term problems facing their country.

Today’s corporate elite is a fragmented, ineffectual group that is unwilling to tackle the big issues, despite unprecedented wealth and political clout. Mizruchi’s sobering assessment of the dissolution of America’s business class helps explain the polarization and gridlock that stifle U.S. politics.

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Free Markets with Solidarity and Sustainability
Martin Schlag
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
The contributors to Free Markets with Sustainability and Solidarity, who represent a unique combination of European and American scholars, present their reflections on evolving forms of economics. All are unified by a holistic, Christian anthropology, from which they draw epistemological consequences for free markets and a free society.
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Global Corporate Citizenship
Anuradha Dayal-Gulati and Mark Finn
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Global Corporate Citizenship looks at issues of corporate responsibility globally, not just at multinational corporations operating worldwide, but at companies in developing countries facing important challenges within their own countries.

Featuring impressive original field research by Kellogg School of Management graduate students in the Global Initiatives in Management program, individual sections of the book are dedicated to issues of corporate citizenship in a wide range of countries including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Argentina, and South Africa. An introduction by Kellogg professor Daniel Diermeier sets the book in context as corporations come to terms with the complex issues facing the significance and limits of global corporate citizenship.
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In the River They Swim
Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty
Michael Fairbanks
Templeton Press, 2009

The sociologist Thomas Sowell writes, "We need to confront the most blatant fact that has persisted across centuries of social history—vast ddifferences in productivity among peoples, and the economic and other consequences of such differences." Poverty demeans dignity, shrinks the soul, wastes potential, and inflicts suffering on three billion people on our planet. We must also acknowledge that, during the past fifty yyears, the record in international assistance to the least developed countries has been disappointing; the economics-based abstractions developed in the think tanks of Europe and North America are insufficient.

In the River They Swim is the antithesis of that search for solutions to the next big theory of global poverty. From the fresh perspective of advisors on the frontlines of development to the insight of leaders like President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Pastor Rick Warren, it tells the story of change in the microcosms of emerging businesses, industries, and governments. These essays display a personal nature to their work that rigorous analysis alone cannot explain.

We learn that a Sufi master can teach us about the different levels of knowledge, the "different ways to know a river." These practitioners could have written about its length, its source, its depth, its width, the power of its current, and the life it contains. They could have invested time and money to travel to that river so that they could sit on its shores and look at it, feel the sand that borders it, and watch the birds at play over it. Instead, they dove in to swim in the river, felt its current along their bodies, and tasted something of it. They wondered, briefly, if they had the strength to swim its length, and now they share the answer.

If human development is a river, the authors in this volume, and perhaps some readers, will no longer be satisfied to stand along its banks.

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Investing in the Homeland
Migration, Social Ties, and Foreign Firms
Benjamin A.T. Graham
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Once viewed as a “brain drain,” migrants are increasingly viewed as a resource for promoting economic development back in their home countries. In Investing in the Homeland, Benjamin Graham finds that diasporans—migrants and their descendants—play a critical role in linking foreign firms to social networks in developing countries, allowing firms to flourish even in challenging political environments most foreign investors shun.

Graham’s analysis draws on new data from face-to-face interviews with the managers of over 450 foreign firms operating in two developing countries: Georgia and the Philippines. Diaspora-owned and diaspora-managed firms are better connected than other foreign firms and they use social ties to resolve disputes and influence government policy. At the same time, Graham shows that diaspora-affiliated firms are no more socially responsible than their purely foreign peers—at root, they are profit-seeking enterprises, not development NGOs. Graham identifies implications for policymakers seeking to capture the development potential of diaspora investment and for managers of multinational firms who want to harness diasporans as a source of sustained competitive advantage.
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It's Legal but It Ain't Right
Harmful Social Consequences of Legal Industries
Nikos Passas and Neva Goodwin
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and to hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time.

This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy.
Nikos Passas is Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

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Junctures in Women's Leadership
Business
Hetfield, Lisa
Rutgers University Press, 2016
How have women managed to break through the glass ceiling of the business world, and what management techniques do they employ once they ascend to the upper echelons of power? What difficult situations have these female business leaders faced, and what strategies have they used to resolve those challenges? 
 
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business answers these questions by highlighting the professional accomplishments of twelve remarkable women and examining how they responded to critical leadership challenges. Some of the figures profiled in the book are household names, including lifestyle maven Martha Stewart, influential chef Alice Waters, and trailblazing African-American entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker. Others have spent less time in the public eye, such as Johnson & Johnson executive JoAnn Heffernan Heisen, Verizon Senior Vice President Diane McCarthy, Wells Fargo technology leader Avid Modjtabai, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Spanx founder Sara Blakely, inventor Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, engineering firm President Roseline Marston, Calvert Investments President and CEO Barbara Krumsiek, and Merrill Lynch executive Subha Barry. These women, from diverse backgrounds, have played important roles in their respective corporations and many have worked to improve the climate for women in male-dominated industries. 
 
This is a book about women who are leading change in business. Their stories illuminate the ways women are using their power and positions—whether from the middle ranks or the top, whether from within companies or by creating their own companies.  Each case study in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business includes a compelling and instructive story of how a woman business leader handled a critical juncture or crisis in her career.  Not only does the book offer an inspiring composite portrait of women succeeding in the business world, it also provides leadership lessons that will benefit readers regardless of gender.
 
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Manufacturing Discontent
The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society
Michael Perelman
Pluto Press, 2005
Corporate power has a huge impact on the rights and privileges of individuals—as workers, consumers, and citizens. This book explores the myth of individualism, which makes people perceive themselves as having choices, when in fact most peoples' options are very limited.



Perelman describes the manufacture of unhappiness—the continual generation of dissatisfaction with products people are encouraged to purchase and quickly discard—and the complex techniques corporations employ to avoid responsibility and accountability to their workers, consumers and the environment. He outlines ways in which individuals can surpass individualism and instead work together to check the growing power of corporations.



While other books have surveyed the corporate landscape, or decried modern consumerism, Perelman, a professor of economics, places these ideas within a proper economic and historical context. He explores the limits of corporate accountability and responsibility, and investigates the relation between a wide range of phenomena such as food, fear and terrorism. Highly readable, Manufacturing Discontent will appeal to anyone with an interest in the way society works—and what really determines the rights of individuals in a corporate society.



Michael Perelman, Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books on economics and economic thought, including Railroading Economics (Routledge, 2006); Class Warfare in the Information Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); The Invention of Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2000) and The Perverse Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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The Many Futures of Work
Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds
Edited by Peter A. Creticos, Larry Bennett, Laura Owen, Costas Spirou, and Maxine Morphis-Riesbeck
Temple University Press, 2021

What will work eventually look like? This is the question at the heart of this timely collection. The editors and contributors—a mix of policy experts, academics, and advocates—seek to reframe the typical projections of the “future” of work. They examine the impact of structural racism on work, the loss of family‑sustaining jobs, the new role of gig work, growing economic inequality, barriers to rewarding employment such as age, gender, disability, and immigration status, and the business policies driving these ongoing challenges. 

Together the essays present varied and practical insights into both U.S. and global trends, discuss the role of labor activism in furthering economic justice, and examine progressive strategies to improve the experience of work, wages, and the lives of workers. The Many Futures of Work offers a range of viable policies and practices that can promote rewarding employment and steer our course away from low-wage, unstable jobs toward jobs that lead to equitable prosperity and economic inclusion.

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Nature and the Marketplace
Capturing The Value Of Ecosystem Services
Geoffrey Heal
Island Press, 2000

In recent years, scientists have begun to focus on the idea that healthy, functioning ecosystems provide essential services to human populations, ranging from water purification to food and medicine to climate regulation. Lacking a healthy environment, these services would have to be provided through mechanical means, at a tremendous economic and social cost.

Nature and the Marketplace examines the controversial proposition that markets should be designed to capture the value of those services. Written by an economist with a background in business, it evaluates the real prospects for various of nature's marketable services to “turn profits” at levels that exceed the profits expected from alternative, ecologically destructive, business activities. The author:

  • describes the infrastructure that natural systems provide, how we depend on it, and how we are affecting it
  • explains the market mechanism and how it can lead to more efficient resource use
  • looks at key economic activities -- such as ecotourism, bioprospecting, and carbon sequestration -- where market forces can provide incentives for conservation
  • examines policy options other than the market, such as pollution credits and mitigation banking
  • considers the issue of sustainability and equity between generations
.

Nature and the Marketplace presents an accessible introduction to the concept of ecosystem services and the economics of the environment. It offers a clear assessment of how market approaches can be used to protect the environment, and illustrates that with a number of cases in which the value of ecosystems has actually been captured by markets.

The book offers a straightforward business economic analysis of conservation issues, eschewing romantic notions about ecosystem preservation in favor of real-world economic solutions. It will be an eye-opening work for professionals, students, and scholars in conservation biology, ecology, environmental economics, environmental policy, and related fields.

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Not Made by Slaves
Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition
Bronwen Everill
Harvard University Press, 2020

How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce.

“East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism.

Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor.

Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.

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Political Standards
Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy
Karthik Ramanna
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Prudent, verifiable, and timely corporate accounting is a bedrock of our modern capitalist system. In recent years, however, the rules that govern corporate accounting have been subtly changed in ways that compromise these core principles, to the detriment of the economy at large. These changes have been driven by the private agendas of certain corporate special interests, aided selectively—and sometimes unwittingly—by arguments from business academia
           
With Political Standards, Karthik Ramanna develops the notion of “thin political markets” to describe a key problem facing technical rule-making in corporate accounting and beyond. When standard-setting boards attempt to regulate the accounting practices of corporations, they must draw on a small pool of qualified experts—but those experts almost always have strong commercial interests in the outcome. Meanwhile, standard setting rarely enjoys much attention from the general public. This absence of accountability, Ramanna argues, allows corporate managers to game the system. In the profit-maximization framework of modern capitalism, the only practicable solution is to reframe managerial norms when participating in thin political markets. Political Standards will be an essential resource for understanding how the rules of the game are set, whom they inevitably favor, and how the process can be changed for a better capitalism.
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The Politics of Value
Three Movements to Change How We Think about the Economy
Jane L. Collins
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The Great Recession not only shook Americans’ economic faith but also prompted powerful critiques of economic institutions. This timely book explores three movements that gathered force after 2008: the rise of the benefit corporation, which requires social responsibility and eschews share price as the best metric for success; the emergence of a new group, Slow Money, that fosters peer-to-peer investing; and the 2011 Wisconsin protests against a bill restricting the union rights of state workers.

Each case shows how the concrete actions of a group of citizens can prompt us to reflect on what is needed for a just and sustainable economic system. In one case, activists raised questions about the responsibilities of business, in the second about the significance of local economies, and in the third about the contributions of the public sector. Through these movements, Jane L. Collins maps a set of cultural conversations about the types of investments and activities that contribute to the health of the economy. Compelling and persuasive, The Politics of Value offers a new framework for viewing economic value, one grounded in thoughtful assessment of the social division of labor and the relationship of the state and the market to civil society.
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Reckoning with Harm
The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia
Amelia Fiske
University of Texas Press, 2023

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.

Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

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Shut Down the Business School
What's Wrong with Management Education
Martin Parker
Pluto Press, 2018
Even as higher education is under attack, one area is thriving: business schools. Shut Down the Business School explains why—and builds a convincing case that they are pernicious and should be closed. Martin Parker writes his polemic from the inside, drawing on his experience as a professor of management, and showing us that business schools are little more than loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism, designed to produce unreflective managers whose primary focus is on their own personal rewards. If we believe that universities have responsibilities to society, Parker argues, then we must challenge the very foundation of the business school and its emphasis on the market above all else.
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Social Enterprise
A Global Comparison
Edited by Janelle A. Kerlin
University Press of New England, 2009
Social enterprise—the use of market-based, civil society approaches to address social issues—has been a growing phenomenon for over twenty years. Gathering essays by researchers and practitioners from around the globe, this volume examines, from a local perspective, the diverse ways in which social enterprise has emerged in different regions. Each chapter examines the conceptualization, history, legal and political frameworks, supporting institutions, and latest developments and challenges for social enterprise in a given region or country. In the final chapter, Janelle A. Kerlin presents a comparative analysis of the various models and contexts for social enterprise, showing how particular strengths in each environment lead to different enterprise initiative models.
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Social Partnering in Latin America
Lessons Drawn from Collaborations of Businesses and Civil Society Organizations
Social Enterprise Knowledge Network SEKN, ,James E. Austin, Ezequiel Reficco, Gabriel Berger, Rosa María Fischer, Roberto Gutierrez, Mladen Koljatic, Gerardo Lozano, and Enrique Ogliastri
Harvard University Press, 2004

Can businesses collaborate with nonprofit organizations? Drawing lessons from 24 cases of cross-sector partnerships spanning the hemisphere, Social Partnering in Latin America analyzes how businesses and nonprofits are creating partnerships to move beyond traditional corporate philanthropy. An American supermarket and a Mexican food bank, an Argentine newspaper and a solidarity network, and a Chilean pharmacy chain and an elder care home are just a few examples of how businesses are partnering with community organizations in powerful ways throughout Latin America. The authors analyze why and how such social partnering occurs.

The book provides a compelling framework for understanding cross-sector collaborations and identifying motivations for partnering and key levers that maximize value creation for participants and society.

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Sustainability Strategies for Industry
The Future Of Corporate Practice
Edited by Nigel J. Roome
Island Press, 1998

Sustainability Strategies for Industry contains essays by members of the Greening of Industry Network that examine the emerging picture of sustainability and its implications for industry and for the relationship between industry and other social actors -- consumers, employees, and the community at large. The book seeks to define sustainability in an industrial context, and addresses how the shift to sustainaibility will affect the role of industry in society, its managerial functions, and its relationships with stakeholders and the environment.

An introductory chapter establishes the scope of the book and its contents, sets out the historical context, and explores the unifying concepts and themes running through the text. Chapters examine.

the meaning of sustainability for industry from a theoretical stance corporate environmentalism company paradigms technology reporting and management systems the role of networks and systems developing country perspectives implications for business research and management educatio.

Contributors -- including Thomas Gladwin, Richard Welford, Andrew Hoffman, John Ehrenfeld, and David Pearce -- offer a bold vision of the sustainable industrial organization of the future and the role and approach that managers in sustainable organizations will assume.

Sustainability Strategies for Industry represents an important work for those interested in the relationship between sustainability and environmental management and protection, and for those interested in the future direction of industrial organization. It will be a valuable text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in business and economics, as well as in environmental studies programs, and for researchers interested in business strategy and interactions between business practice and the environment.

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The Sustainable Company
How to Create Lasting Value through Social and Environmental Performance
Chris Laszlo
Island Press, 2003

The Sustainable Company shows how to create value for shareholders while balancing responsibilities to society and the environment. Its step-by-step approach and tool-kit for managers make this book the solutions manual for the twenty-first-century manager.

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Valuing Nature
A Handbook for Impact Investing
William J. Ginn
Island Press, 2020
As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the resources needed far outstrip the capabilities of nonprofits and even governments. Yet there are seeds of hope—and much of that hope comes from the efforts of the private sector. Impact investing is rapidly becoming an essential tool, alongside philanthropy and government funding, in tackling these major problems. Valuing Nature presents a new set of nature-based investment areas to help conservationists and investors work together.

NatureVest founder William Ginn outlines the emerging private sector investing opportunities in natural assets such as green infrastructure, forests, soils, and fisheries. The first part of Valuing Nature examines the scope of nature-based impact investing while also presenting a practical overview of its limitations and the challenges facing the private sector. The second part of the book offers tools for investors and organizations to consider as they develop their own projects and tips on how nonprofits can successfully navigate this new space. Case studies from around the world demonstrate how we can use private capital to achieve more sustainable uses of our natural resources without the unintended consequences plaguing so many of our current efforts.

Valuing Nature provides a roadmap for conservation professionals, nonprofit managers, and impact investors seeking to use market-based strategies to improve the management of natural systems.
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front cover of Yali's Question
Yali's Question
Sugar, Culture, and History
Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there.

To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.
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