The Enlightened Capitalists

The Enlightened Capitalists PDF Author: James O'Toole
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062880268
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book

Book Description
An expert on ethical leadership analyzes the complicated history of business people who tried to marry the pursuit of profits with virtuous organizational practices—from British industrialist Robert Owen to American retailer John Cash Penney and jeans maker Levi Strauss to such modern-day entrepreneurs Anita Roddick and Tom Chappell. Today’s business leaders are increasingly pressured by citizens, consumers, and government officials to address urgent social and environmental issues. Although some corporate executives remain deaf to such calls, over the last two centuries, a handful of business leaders in America and Britain have attempted to create business organizations that were both profitable and socially responsible. In The Enlightened Capitalists, James O’Toole tells the largely forgotten stories of men and women who adopted forward-thinking business practices designed to serve the needs of their employees, customers, communities, and the natural environment. They wanted to prove that executives didn’t have to make trade-offs between profit and virtue. Combining a wealth of research and vivid storytelling, O’Toole brings life to historical figures like William Lever, the inventor of bar soap who created the most profitable company in Britain and used his money to greatly improve the lives of his workers and their families. Eventually, he lost control of the company to creditors who promptly terminated the enlightened practices he had initiated—the fate of many idealistic capitalists. As a new generation attempts to address social problems through enlightened organizational leadership, O’Toole explores a major question being posed today in Britain and America: Are virtuous corporate practices compatible with shareholder capitalism?

The Enlightened Capitalists

The Enlightened Capitalists PDF Author: James O'Toole
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062880268
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book

Book Description
An expert on ethical leadership analyzes the complicated history of business people who tried to marry the pursuit of profits with virtuous organizational practices—from British industrialist Robert Owen to American retailer John Cash Penney and jeans maker Levi Strauss to such modern-day entrepreneurs Anita Roddick and Tom Chappell. Today’s business leaders are increasingly pressured by citizens, consumers, and government officials to address urgent social and environmental issues. Although some corporate executives remain deaf to such calls, over the last two centuries, a handful of business leaders in America and Britain have attempted to create business organizations that were both profitable and socially responsible. In The Enlightened Capitalists, James O’Toole tells the largely forgotten stories of men and women who adopted forward-thinking business practices designed to serve the needs of their employees, customers, communities, and the natural environment. They wanted to prove that executives didn’t have to make trade-offs between profit and virtue. Combining a wealth of research and vivid storytelling, O’Toole brings life to historical figures like William Lever, the inventor of bar soap who created the most profitable company in Britain and used his money to greatly improve the lives of his workers and their families. Eventually, he lost control of the company to creditors who promptly terminated the enlightened practices he had initiated—the fate of many idealistic capitalists. As a new generation attempts to address social problems through enlightened organizational leadership, O’Toole explores a major question being posed today in Britain and America: Are virtuous corporate practices compatible with shareholder capitalism?

Rentier Capitalism

Rentier Capitalism PDF Author: Brett Christophers
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739744
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Get Book

Book Description
How did Britain’s economy become a bastion of inequality? In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier capitalism’, in which ownership of key types of scarce assets—such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms—is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today’s economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism—vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation—are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.

A Force for Good

A Force for Good PDF Author: John G. Taft
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466879424
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
After the crisis of 2008, the social contract between the financial industry and everyone else was badly broken-perhaps, it seemed, irrevocably. Since then, banks have paid out billion-dollar settlements and Congress has passed some new laws, but a deeper rapprochement is still missing. John Taft has gathered some of the greatest financial minds of our time to explore how Wall Street can harness the same creative energy that invented credit default swaps and channel it towards the public good- in the form of a stable retirement system, investment strategies that protect the environment and reward responsible corporate behavior, and a financial industry with a culture of ethics, integrity and client focus. These perspectives, from a who's who of leaders in the field, offer a blueprint for a new kind of responsible finance and banking that secures the future for everyone. Contributors include: * Robert Shiller on financial capitalism and innovation *Charles D. Ellis on restoring ethical standards *Sheila Bair on regulatory reform *John C. Bogle and Mary Schapiro on rebuilding investor trust *Judd Gregg on long-term fiscal imbalances *Barbara Novick on the retirement savings gap *David Blood on sustainable finance. With so much brainpower in the financial sector, the potential for change is limitless. A Force for Good is the call to action the industry sorely needs.

Assetization

Assetization PDF Author: Kean Birch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539179
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book

Book Description
How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process. The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and “natural capital”; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and “monetizable social ills.” Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism. Contributors Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet, Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy, James W. Williams

Capitalism at Risk

Capitalism at Risk PDF Author: Joseph L. Bower
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422130037
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book

Book Description
Identifies ten potential dangers to the global market system, providing examples of companies that are thriving and describing how a businesses must develop corporate strategies that are innovative and strenghten institutions at community, national, and international levels.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism PDF Author: Luc Boltanski
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859845547
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 664

Get Book

Book Description
A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?

Does Capitalism Have a Future? PDF Author: Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199330859
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book

Book Description
In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive.

Sustainable Capitalism

Sustainable Capitalism PDF Author: John E. Ikerd
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565492064
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
* Addresses the philosophical and scientific roots of sustainability * Examines neglected ethical and moral aspects of capitalist economic theory * Advocates a new sustainable paradigm for all living organizations, businesses, economics, and societies Over the past half-century, capitalist economics has deviated from its original social purpose into an amoral quest for economic growth at any cost. A relentless pursuit of profits and the "bottom line" poses a constant threat to the earth and the life upon it. Ikerd, who spent the first half of his thirty-year academic career as a traditional free-market, neoclassical economist, came to see the inherently extractive and exploitative nature of his own field and began to develop an alternative vision for capitalism, which he lays out in this book. In order to foster a new economics of sustainability, social and ethical values must be reintegrated into capitalist economics, thus restoring a sense of balance into the economic system that ensures that communities the world over will thrive. Rather than calling for the overthrow of capitalism, Ikerd suggests how capitalism can become a vehicle for these ends. Both a penetrating critique of capitalism and an exploration of its vast and untapped potential for maximizing human welfare, Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Senseis written for those concerned with the future of our planet and the continued viability of global capitalism.

The Pricing of Progress

The Pricing of Progress PDF Author: Eli Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
How did Americans come to quantify their society’s well-being in units of money? In our GDP-run world, prices are the measure of not only goods and commodities but our environment, communities, nation, even self-worth. Eli Cook shows how, and why, we moderns lost sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life.

Capitalism

Capitalism PDF Author: Garry Leech
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 178032202X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book

Book Description
In the wake of the global financial crisis, and ongoing savage government cuts across the world, Garry Leech addresses a pressing and necessary topic: the nature of contemporary capitalism, and how it inherently generates inequality and structural violence. Drawing on a number of fascinating case studies from across the world - including the forced displacement of farmers in Mexico, farmer suicides in India, and deaths from preventable and treatable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the unsustainable exploitation of the planet's natural resources - Leech provocatively argues that global capitalism constitutes a form of genocide against the poor, particularly in the global South. Essential and eye-opening the book questions the legitimacy of a system that inevitably results in such large-scale human suffering, while going beyond mere critique to offer a more egalitarian, democratic and sustainable global alternative.