Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society
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?
In Everyone's Business Amit Ron and I 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.
Everyone's Business is available for order through the University of Chicago Press website.
The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation
What are we to make of the power that corporations wield over people in modern society? Is such power legitimate? Many think so. To them, firms are purely private and economic entities, which are justified in using all legal means to pursue profit. Others disagree. They see corporations as purely political institutions, which are created by states and can only be legitimated if they are made to pursue social ends beyond profit.
In The Form of the Firm, I argue that both of these influential approaches overstate their cases dramatically. While it is true that corporations exist primarily to increase economic efficiency, they do this in ways that distinguish them from the markets in which they operate. Corporations are not natural outgrowths of the free market, but institutions that we have developed to correct market inefficiencies through mechanisms normally associated with politics –hierarchy, power, and state-sanctioned authority. Corporations serve economic ends, but through political means. Because of this, I argue that they also must be structured and obliged to uphold the social and political values that enable their existence and smooth-running in the first place: individual autonomy, moral and social equality, and democratic norms and procedures.
The Form of the Firm is available for order through the Oxford University Press website.
