Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society

Cover
Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Tables
Introduction: An Intellectual History of American Market Reformers and their Critics
	Toward a “gentler capitalism”?
	Market reformism: definition
	Normative justifications of capitalism go far beyond free market thinking
	An American spirit of capitalism?
	Karl Polanyi’s legacy
	The history and strategy of corporate social responsibility and business ethics
	The approach
	Book overview
	Concepts
	Notes
1: O Father, Where Art Thou: The Spirit of Paternalistic Capitalism in the Age of the First Great Transformation (1870s–1900)
	The challenges of industrialization
	Responding to industrialization: market reformism as an alternative promise of social protection
	Christianity as civilizer
	An early progressive evaluates a company town
	In defense of laissez-faire and “the forgotten man”
	The business of business is everyone’s business
	Conclusion: paternalistic market reformism and its critics
	Notes
2: A Corporation Lives in Society: The Invention of Managerial Capitalism in the Age of the New Deal (1930s–1960s)
	Market reformists steering clear of new challenges
	Beyond laissez-faire? Big business, crisis, and post-capitalism, c.1900–45
	The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: Barnard in praise of cooperation
		If it exists, it must be legitimate: the moral organization
		Against the “oversimplification of economic life”
		Beyond individualism and collectivism
		Greatness achieved through self-sacrificing participation in an organization
	Restoring communities: Mayo and human relations
	Drucker: “A corporation lives in society”
		A market solution to unemployment
		Economic man: natural or rational?
	The soulful corporation
	The American business creed
	Conclusion: legitimizing the “social corporation” in the midst of mid-century regulated capitalism
	Notes
3: The New Man Wants Your Soul: Critiquing Managerial Capitalism (1945–1960s)
	Contested concepts of American capitalism and of the corporation
	Criticisms of the all-embracing corporation
	“Cool” contracts or unbreakable bonds?
	Galbraith’s Keynesianism and the concept of countervailing power
		Against the uncontested principle of market self-regulation
		Building checks and balances into the economy
	Neoliberals against social responsibilities of business: on the sanctity of property rights
		“A fundamentally subversive doctrine”
	The “soulful corporation” and the Marxist argument against it
		“Business is America’s national game”
	Conclusion: contesting the image of the moral, social, and soulful corporation
	Notes
4: How to Do Well and Do Good: The Spirit of Entrepreneurial Capitalism in the Age of the Second Great Transformation (1970s–2000s)
	From the New Deal era to triumphant capitalism: polarization, the crisis of Keynesianism, and the end of a bipolar world order (late 1960s–1990s)
	TINA: the supremacy and necessity of capitalism
	A return to the classical business creed?
	Market populism
		Enter the “new economy”
		Revolutionary business
		The end of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”
	We are all capitalists now
	Moral self-governance in an age of globalization
		Doing business in the service of Christianity, the nation, or humanity and life itself
	A divided reform movement?
	The entrepreneurial self
		No limits to individual growth
		Covey reads Franklin: the return of the “self-made man”
		Lessons from Dachau: Covey with Frankl
		It’s the economy, stupid!
	Conclusion: entrepreneurial market reformism in the age of globalization
		Resurgence of a classic and a progressive business creed: tension or contradiction?
		Entrepreneurial market reformism
	Notes
5: Corporations are Not Set Up to be Charities: Critiquing Entrepreneurial Capitalism (1990s–2000s)
	A revival of critique
	A neo-conservative’s critique: revisiting Fukuyama
	Social criticism: inequality, shortcomings of markets, and the need for countervailing power
		What markets cannot achieve: securing primary goods and public goods
		Critiquing the power of corporations
		“If laissez-faire conservatives had had their way”
	Neo-Marxist social criticism of a global—and total—capitalism
		Global capitalism as “the sovereign power that governs the world”
		Resistance: the multitude against empire
		Immaterial labor as “deep capitalization” and as foundation for a post-capitalist reality
		A radical postmodern republicanism against capitalism
		The Lexus and the Olive Tree of the far left?
	Sociological and political critiques of moral self-governance of business
		The potentials and the limitations of “really existing CSR”
		Critiquing moral self-governance: neoliberalism, hostile worlds, and deradicalization
	Republican liberalism: putting society and economy in the right order
		The myth of amoral business
		Ethical limitations of corporate philanthropy and of the business case for ethics
	Conclusion: triumphant global capitalism in an age of a new “great transformation” is countered by social and conservative critiques
		Critiquing the progressive business creed
	Notes
Conclusion: Progressive Business and its Critics in Retrospect
	Social protection through business? Concluding remarks
	What is wrong with market reformism? Historical critiques in retrospect
		Market reformism’s failure in respect to democracy, universal welfare, and institutional pluralism
		Market reformism provides an ideological smokescreen for capitalism, leaving social critics in the dark
		Market reformism: an instrumentalist kind of ethics
		Diagnostics: market reformism as paternalism or as part of neoliberal governance?
		Free market liberalism and its critique of market reformism
		The profit-maximizing firm
		“In the final instance . . . ”? Renewing ideology critique
		Market reformism in the aftermath of the financial crisis
	Notes
Bibliography
Index