Corporations and the Common Good
Leroy S Rouner editor Robert B Dickie editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Notre Dame Press
Published:30th Apr '86
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Multinational corporations are highly regarded by some as the crowning achievement of American enterprise. For a significant and increasingly vocal group of Americans, however, the large corporation inspires suspicion if not outright hostility.
While some share these suspicions, the contributors to this volume are persuaded that the large corporation is not only here to stay, as Kenneth Mason argues, but has become the definitive institution of modern Western culture. The large corporation dominates the modern world in much the same way that the church and the university dominated the medieval world. Corporations and the Common Good clarifies the suspicions about how corporations came to be, what makes them work, and what needs to be done to change them and their impact on our society.
These were the questions which motivated a colloquium at Boston University on what we chose to call "The Philosophy of the Large Corporation." That enigmatic title was their way of avoiding another conference on "business ethics" and inaugurating a too-brief, admittedly rough-edged, but nevertheless serious attempt to find out how large corporations affect the common good in our culture. The colloquium was sponsored jointly by Boston University's Institute for Philosophy and Religion and its School of Management.
"...a well-organized collection of searching essays. It tracks the broad field of business ethics from system to corporation to person and is a valuable contribution to the literature." —Kenneth E. Goodpaster, Harvard University
"Corporations and the Common Good claims such eminent contributors as Peter Berger, Robert Heilbroner, George C. Lodge, James E. Post, Kenneth Mason, Peter Jones, and Edwin A. Murray, Jr. It examines facets of the complex, and often vexing, relationship between big business and the society it functions in." –The Boston Globe
"Corporations and the Common Good, a short collection of essays edited by Boston University professors Robert B. Dickie and Leroy S. Rouner, provides an engaging entree into this new sub-basement of societal theory. While questions of front-line tactics (When does a commission become a bribe?) get some passing attention—much of the book relates to a fundamental question—whether the 'private' agenda of the corporation is now obsolete in our interdependent world of unstable nuclear reactors and industrial contaminants....The sharpest essay come from Kenneth Mason, former president of Quaker Oats. Readable, concrete, and incisive, Mason's essay, castigates corporate leaders from inside the club.... Mason's essay, like much else in Corporations and the Common Good, reminds us that the principle laid down by Chief Justice Marshall cuts both ways. If corporations are simply what the law says they are, then an angry society may someday strip them of the very unnatural right to focus only on profit." –The Philadelphia Inquirer
ISBN: 9780268007546
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 13mm
Weight: 354g
160 pages