We Don’t Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, and Solving Mizruchi and Hirschman’s Paradox

Previously, Northern Italian, Dutch, and then English entrepreneurs had dominated global trade in turn, and when after a century or so their respective hegemonies began to show cracks, each group refocused its efforts in the service of tapping already-accumulated wealth through financial speculation and, in the process, also financed the rise of their successors.20 If Dahrendorf was correct, and American capital was managed during the era of American industrial dominance by “a class of career bureaucrats, whose primary loyalty lay with their employer rather than with a class of property owners,”21 there are good reasons to believe that that has ceased to be the case. “Property owners,” meaning in the American case those who control and stand to benefit from financial activity (leaving aside the question as to whether shares of corporate stock should be defined as “property”), have absorbed these onetime “career bureaucrats” into their ranks. And as this subsumption has occurred, corporate executives have had no reason to either identify themselves as a distinct political grouping or proactively embrace civic responsibilities once thought necessary for maintaining a productive society. This Article will cover these issues in five Parts. Part II lays out Arrighi’s theory of hegemonic rise and decline in detail. Parts III, IV, and V apply Arrighi’s model of a three-stage hegemonic cycle to the assumption, application, and abandonment of corporate social responsibility on the part of American corporate leaders: first, when the United States became the world’s dominant manufacturer; then, in the post-war years when it became militarily and politically hegemonic as well, and finally, during this last generation, as the hypertrophy of the American financial sector masked the nation’s hegemonic decline. Part VI concludes by solving, in more detail, Mizruchi and Hirschman’s paradox

We Don’t Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, and Solving Mizruchi and Hirschman’s Paradox

Previously, Northern Italian, Dutch, and then English entrepreneurs had dominated global trade in turn, and when after a century or so their respective hegemonies began to show cracks, each group refocused its efforts in the service of tapping already-accumulated wealth through financial speculation and, in the process, also financed the rise of their successors.20 If Dahrendorf was correct, and American capital was managed during the era of American industrial dominance by “a class of career bureaucrats, whose primary loyalty lay with their employer rather than with a class of property owners,”21 there are good reasons to believe that that has ceased to be the case. “Property owners,” meaning in the American case those who control and stand to benefit from financial activity (leaving aside the question as to whether shares of corporate stock should be defined as “property”), have absorbed these onetime “career bureaucrats” into their ranks. And as this subsumption has occurred, corporate executives have had no reason to either identify themselves as a distinct political grouping or proactively embrace civic responsibilities once thought necessary for maintaining a productive society. This Article will cover these issues in five Parts. Part II lays out Arrighi’s theory of hegemonic rise and decline in detail. Parts III, IV, and V apply Arrighi’s model of a three-stage hegemonic cycle to the assumption, application, and abandonment of corporate social responsibility on the part of American corporate leaders: first, when the United States became the world’s dominant manufacturer; then, in the post-war years when it became militarily and politically hegemonic as well, and finally, during this last generation, as the hypertrophy of the American financial sector masked the nation’s hegemonic decline. Part VI concludes by solving, in more detail, Mizruchi and Hirschman’s paradox

What is the corporation and why does it matter?

‘Management’ is widely and deeply embedded in ‘corporations’. Yet in many studies of management and organization the corporation is an influential but shadowy and largely unaccountable presence. Rarely is the modern, capitalist corporation thematized. This article contributes to remedying this omission by attending to how the corporation is a product of three imaginaries: legal, economic, and political. In the post-medieval order, the legal imaginary made possible the construction of the corporate form; the economic imaginary has promoted an expansion of this form and shaped its subsequent development; and, finally, the political imaginary offers a way of appreciating how politics, including the power of the state, is key to (i) the rise of the modern corporation, and (ii) to a recognition of how the primacy of the political in the formation and development of the modern corporation is articulated through, and obscured behind, the dominance of legal and economic imaginaries. Attending to the three imaginaries, it is argued, is central to a thorough comprehension of the modern corporation, a concomitant appreciation of its deeply divisive consequences, and lastly, to the development of policies designed to counteract its malign effects

Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective

This essay is inspired by the ideas and research examined in the special section on “Stakeholder Marketing” of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing in 2010. The authors argue that stakeholder marketing is slowly coalescing with the broader thinking that has occurred in the stakeholder management and ethics literature streams during the past quarter century. However, the predominant view of stakeholders that many marketers advocate is still primarily pragmatic and company centric. The position advanced herein is that stronger forms of stakeholder marketing that reflect more normative, macro/societal, and network-focused orientations are necessary. The authors briefly explain and justify these characteristics in the context of the growing “prosociety” and “proenvironment” perspectives—orientations that are also in keeping with the public policy focus of this journal. Under the “hard form” of stakeholder theory, which the authors endorse, marketing managers must realize that serving stakeholders sometimes requires sacrificing maximum profits to mitigate outcomes that would inflict major damage on other stakeholders, especially society

Inequality, Inc

To engage with inequality, I explore how corporate governance theory is based on inherently contingent ideas of the legal and organizational structuring of the modern public corporation in a corporate ‘architecture’ and how these contingent ideas affect the distribution of privileges, protections and proceeds to different types of actors. I argue that the currently dominant corporate governance theory ignores a specific corporate architecture that provided internal and external legitimacy to the modern public corporation by embedding a set of trade-offs between constituent groups and cementing those trade-offs into a broader institutional setting. Ignoring this architecture leads to the redirection of the privileges and protections embodied in the modern corporation to the exclusive benefit of an implicit coalition of market value-oriented shareholders and managers, while the risks to all other actors, interests and timeframes are relegated to the status of ‘externalities’. I explore how a focus on contingent conceptions of the modern corporation and of corporate governance provides an organizational-level explanation for growing inequality with which existing sectoral and state-centric approaches and means for engagement can be complemented

Comparative Capitalism without Capitalism, and Production without Workers: The Limits and Possibilities of Contemporary Institutional Analysis

The aim of this paper is to consider the extent to which the comparative capitalism literature fully reflects the available empirical evidence in its attempts to model different versions of capitalism and, in particular, whether it adequately captures the roles of diverse stakeholders within the capitalist system. In doing so, particular attention is accorded to the varieties of capitalism literature, business systems theory and regulation theory. In addition, there is reflection in the paper on whether any strand of the literature is able to deal effectively with the recent economic crisis and systemic change. It is argued that more attention needs to be devoted to exploring the structural causes of change and the marginalization of the interests of key social groupings, most notably workers, from the process of institutional redesign