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Against the backdrop of Enron and the other high-profile cases of corporate malfeasance, it is easy to paint today's executives as villains and blame big business, and corporations generally, for a wide array of social ills. Is the criticism warranted? Not quite, says Evan Osborne, as he traces the history of anti-corporate sentiment and assesses the fever-pitch hatred, by some, of all things corporate. While not perfect angels, Osborne argues, corporations confer many more benefits to society than ills. Moreover, they are an essential engine of human progress, and longstanding legal principles are more than adequate to address their flaws. And that makes the rising tide of anti-corporate sentiment dangerous. Why? Look at the facts: Large corporations inspire both awe and fear. On the one hand, they create jobs, introduce scientific and technological breakthroughs, open up borders through trade, and provide indispensable products and services that make life easier. On the other hand, many think they undermine the will of the people, encourage bribery and corruption, finance oppressive regimes, ruin values and culture, befoul the environment, and encourage economic inequality. It was no accident that the terrorists of September 11 targeted the World Trade Center, an iconic symbol of American financial power. In this provocative book, Evan Osborne pulls back the curtain to illuminate how corporations have evolved as an essential element of society, and how opposition to them has developed out of proportion—a fire fanned by anti-business activists, the media, and other groups. He sets the record straight, explaining how corporations work, how they have evolved in the context of other institutions, the net benefits they provide—and how to deal with their undeniable imperfections. At the same time, he shows how anti-business claims have become more strident and where these arguments fail to stand up to scrutiny.
An economist traces the evolution of anti-corporate sentiment and shows why much of the criticism of corporations and business people has been misguided.
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
This book examines the electoral successes of anti-system forces in the rich democracies. It explains the rise of anti-system politicians and parties in terms of two separate but closely related developments: the rise of economic inequality and insecurity over the last four decades, and the failure of political elites to address them.
We Are Everywhere is a whirlwind collection of writings, images and ideas for direct action by people on the frontlines of the global anticapitalist movement. This is a movement of untold stories, because those from below are not those who get to write history, even though we are the ones making it. We Are Everywhere wrenches our history from the grasp of the powerful and returns it to the streets, fields and neighbourhoods where it was made.
The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise. The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century. Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story. McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
Explains the character of contemporary protest politics through a micro-mobilization analysis of participation in street demonstrations.
Living on a Meme - How Anti-Corporate Activists Bend the Truth, and You, to Get What They Want is about the NGOs and activist groups that engage corporations adversarially and how they use "meme" to further their anti-corporate agendas. What's meme? Say the word as meeeeeem. The dictionary says that a meme is an idea that spreads from one person to another. And thanks to today's Internet, memes get started, spread, and believed in a flash, whether they are true or not, making them formidable tools for groups that damage company reputations. Here in his fifth book, author Richard Telofski takes an in-depth look at anti-corporate NGOs and activist groups that use memes cleverly to "compete" with the image of the companies they target. These groups unabashedly use unchallenged memes to bribe people to their side of their anti-corporate argument. Bribe? Yes. By leveraging a meme, these groups bribe people with something, a way to feel better about themselves, often with scant or no support of the meme. Through their "meme-mangling," adversarial NGOs and activists can impose undeserved damage on corporate reputations, costing market share, revenue, and jobs, maybe one of them yours. These organizations are truly competitors, not only to the individual corporations that they target, but also to the economic system in general. Living on a Meme is compiled from a selection of articles published on Richard's Web site, Telofski.com, between August 1, 2009 through August 3, 2010. But, many of these writings are more essay than article. Within the essays in this book, you'll find insights, theories, as well as specific facts and analysis on how certain NGOs and activist groups operate online and offline to sap companies of their vital reputation. By reading this book, you'll discover how these "irregular" competitors make use of existing cultural memes, true or not, and how they contribute to those memes, strengthening them and contributing to the degradation of a company's image. Don't worry. This book isn't just a repackaging of blog postings. You're going to get more than that. At the end of each chapter you will find bonus "Take-Aways." Those Take-Aways are critical analyses of the essays in the chapter, pointing out for you how what was just discussed relates to an NGO's or activist's reliance of living on a meme or their hope that YOU are living on THEIR meme for them. You'll also find in this book 23 exclusive essays that appear only in this book. So, start your journey now into the understanding of how anti-corporate NGOs and activists bend the truth, and the beliefs of people, to get what they want.
In this first history of Arab American activism in the 1960s, Pamela Pennock brings to the forefront one of the most overlooked minority groups in the history of American social movements. Focusing on the ideas and strategies of key Arab American organizations and examining the emerging alliances between Arab American and other anti-imperialist and antiracist movements, Pennock sheds new light on the role of Arab Americans in the social change of the era. She details how their attempts to mobilize communities in support of Middle Eastern political or humanitarian causes were often met with suspicion by many Americans, including heavy surveillance by the Nixon administration. Cognizant that they would be unable to influence policy by traditional electoral means, Arab Americans, through slow coalition building over the course of decades of activism, brought their central policy concerns and causes into the mainstream of activist consciousness. With the support of new archival and interview evidence, Pennock situates the civil rights struggle of Arab Americans within the story of other political and social change of the 1960s and 1970s. By doing so, she takes a crucial step forward in the study of American social movements of that era.
In 1973, Daniel Bell argued that corporations in post-industrial societies increasingly needed to behave in accord with widely accepted social norms, particularly in terms of ethical behavior and social responsibility. Yet widespread criticism of business behavior was not an invention of the 1960s and 70s or a product of changing commercial norms. The key feature historically has been business scandal. Understandings of how the field of business ethics has emerged are undeveloped, however. This book is the first attempt to explain the conditions which saw a focus develop on business ethics especially in the 1960s and 70s, and how the broader field developed to encompass related notions such as corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, ethical leadership, sustainable business and responsible management education. The Rise of Business Ethics provides an introduction and analysis of the key developments in contemporary business ethics by examining them in terms of their diachronic development – the key thinkers, the key issues, the key institutions and how they each contributed to contemporary understandings of business ethics, governance and practice. Addressing the topic from a European as well as North American perspective, The Rise of Business Ethics will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business ethics, business and society, business history, organization studies and political economy.