Results by title

Business is political. What are the ethics of it?

Businesses are political actors. They not only fund political campaigns, take stances on social issues, and wave the flags of identity groups – they also affect politics in their everyday hiring and investment decisions. As a highly polarized public demands political alignment from the powerful businesses they deal with, what’s a company to do?

Amit Ron and Abraham Singer show that the unavoidably political role of companies in modern life is both the fundamental problem and inescapable fact of business ethics: corporate power makes business ethics necessary, and business ethics must strive to mitigate corporate power. Because of its economic and social influence, Ron and Singer forcefully argue that modern business’s primary social responsibility is to democracy. Businesses must work to avoid wielding their power in ways that undermine key democratic practices like elections, public debate, and social movements. Pragmatic and urgent, Everyone’s Business offers an essential new framework for how we pursue profit—and democracy—in our increasingly divided world.

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.

2025 Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the American Anthropological Association (AAA)

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.

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.

The Mine Next Door peels back the veneer of corporate public relations to expose the jagged edges that define the boundaries of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Minnesota’s Iron Range. With five years of ethnographic and archival research, Amy O’Connor was able to interview over seventy people, including miners, retired miners, community members, elected officials, and representatives from Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. In addition to illuminating the everyday lives of Minnesota’s taconite miners and community members, she compares the corporate narratives of CSR with these lived experiences to reveal how CSR boundaries are co-constructed, contested, and consequential. 

In this rare ethnographic account of iron ore mining in the United States, O’Connor shows how turning points—whether macrolevel (e.g., capitalism, governmental policy, and regulation) or microlevel (e.g., miner experiences, local culture, company proclivities)—create CSR communicative practice boundaries that are influenced by culture, history, and geography. The permanence and precariousness of the mining industry offers a unique opportunity to show how corporations, workers, and communities both collaborate and clash. The Mine Next Door argues that to understand CSR communicative practices, we must move beyond the staid, homogeneous CSR reports and glossy public relations documents to reveal the messy and contradictory moments of decision wherein corporations and communities determine where a company has power and responsibility.