Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy PDF Download

Author: Dean Ritz
Publisher: Apex Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Author: Steven K. May
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190208368
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume available on the question of just how "social" business ought to be. The volume includes contributions from the fields of communication, business, law, sociology, political science, economics, accounting, and environmental studies. Moreover, it draws from experiences and examples from around the world, including but not limited to recent corporate scandals and controversies in the U.S. and Europe. A number of the chapters examine closely the basic assumptions underlying the philosophy of socially responsible business. Other chapters speak to the practical challenges and possibilities for corporate social responsiblilty in the twenty-first century. One of the most distinctive features of the book is its coverage of the very ways that the issue of corporate social responsibility has been defined, shaped, and discussed in the past four decades. That is, the editors and many of the authors are attuned to the persuasive strategies and formulations used to talk about socially responsible business, and demonstrate why the talk matters. For example, the book offers a careful analysis of how certain values have become associated with the business enterprise and how particular economic and political positions have been established by and for business. This book will be of great interest to scholars, business leaders, graduate students, and others interested in the contours of the debate over what role large-scale corporate commerce should take in the future of the industrialized world.

Author: Dan Butts
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1553956958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
The recent accounting and corporate scandals of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, K-Mart and McWane (producer of cast iron water and sewer pipes), which has killed 9 workers and injured 4600 more with impunity since 1995- and other greedy and lawless billion dollar behemoths- are just the tip of the iceberg relative to the serious and pervasive harm that corporations and greed are doing to people, communities, the earth and to our children's and grandchildren's future. How Corporations Hurt Us All examines many crises including how Big Oil, billion dollar weapons contractors, and unaccountable private firms like DynCorps are continuing dangerous and immoral Cold War policies by driving multiple wars and military operations; our collapsing corporate health care system that restricts free speech, stifles public debate, and manipulates public opinion to serve narrow corporate and political goals. Some of the world's largest multinational corporationsDExxonMobil(#1 oil company), Wal-Mart (#1 retailer), HCA (#1 hospital conglomerate), Citigroup (the world's #1 financial institution)- and other rogue operations are profiled in the book. The good news is that there are effective approaches to all of these interrelated, greed-driven crises. Even more hopeful are the corporate reform and global economic democracy movements representing thousands of dedicated citizens' groups and millions fo individuals throughout the world. Yet, what is ultimately necessary to reverse global economic, social, and environmental deterioration and eventual collapse, insure world peace and security, strength our weakened civil liberties, and fulfill our human potential, as the book explains, is forging a broad consensus on a new bottom line, or organizing principle, for business and society.

Author: Ted Nace
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1576753190
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
'Gangs of America' traces the evolution of the corporation, one of the core institutions of the modern world. It ties political debates about multi-national trade agreements, financial scandals and scores of other specific issues into the narrative account.

Author: Robert Perrucci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742519381
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Extensively revised, the second edition of The New Class Society includes innovative new sections and concepts throughout the book that identify and explore how complex organizational structures and actions create and perpetuate class, gender, and racial inequalities. The authors describe how 'inequality scripts' shape the hiring and promotion practices of organizations in ways that provide differential opportunities to people based on class, gender, and racial memberships. The authors also illustrate how privileged class members benefit from organizationally-based and perpetuated forms of inequality. The second edition retains its provocative argument for of an emerging 'double-diamond' social structure and its focus on class interests that are rapidly polarizing American society. New figures, tables, and references incorporate the latest information and research findings to document and illustrate key topics, such as the distribution of wealth and income, globalization, downsizing, contingent labor, the role of money in politics, media content and consolidation, the transformation of education, and the erosion of democracy. The second edition combines scholarship with an engaging style and flashes of comic relief-with several cartoons by some of the best satirists today. The book, accessibly written for undergraduate students, has been widely adopted in courses on stratification, economic sociology, and American society.

Author: Frances Moore Lappe
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0787983357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Three out of five Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, feel our country is headed in the wrong direction. America is at the edge, a critical place at which we can either renew and revitalize or give in and lose that most precious American ideal--democracy--and along with it the freedom, fairness, and opportunities it assures. Democracy's Edge is a rousing battle cry that we can--and must--act now. From Jefferson to Eisenhower, presidents from both parties have warned us of the danger of letting a closed, narrow group of business and government officials concentrate power over our lives. Yet today, a small and unrepresentative group of people is making vital decisions for all of us. But this crisis is only a symptom, Lappé argues. It's a symptom of thin democracy, something done to us or for us, not by or with us. Such democracy is always at risk of being stolen by private interests or extremist groups, left and right. But there is a solution. The answer, says Lappé, is Living Democracy, a powerful yet often invisible citizens' revolution surging in communities across America. It's not random, disjointed activism but the emergence of a new historical stage of democracy in which Americans realize that democracy isn't something we have but something we do. Either we live it or lose it, says Lappé.

Author: Jane Anne Morris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 9781891843396
Category : Free trade
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Gaveling Down the Rabble, author/activist Jane Anne Morris explores a century and a half of efforts by corporations and the courts to undermine local democracy in the United States by using a "free trade" model. It was that very nineteenth-century model that was later adopted globally by corporations to subvert local attempts at protecting the environment and citizen and worker health.Gaveling Down the Rabble is essential reading for understanding the background of the current struggle for U.S. democracy -- local, state and national -- against growing corporate power and how we can challenge it.Since the late 1800s the U.S. Supreme Court has been cutting our local, state and national democracy off at the knees -- in the name of "free trade" -- by usurping the power to make public policy from our elected representatives in the Congress and the state legislatures and by giving power to corporations over citizens.By erecting a "free trade" zone in the U.S., corporations and their champions on the Supreme Court have seen to it that "we do not have a chance of building a democracy." Morris looks at what substantive democracy should look like, and how far from that ideal the Supreme Court -- without consent of Congress -- has moved us.As presidential candidates are deploring the loss of American jobs from the global trade agreements that were supposed to bring us new prosperity, a public debate is finally opening about the consequences of the last decade of global corporatization. In contrast, we do not debate the internal "free trade" at home that is hidden from view.This urgent new book reveals one hidden source of the corporate power that has been steadily crushing our self governance: namely, the U.S. Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution, implemented by nine unelected Presidential appointees.Most significant: Morris shows how environmental, labor and civil-rights cases using Commerce Clause arguments, rather than Constitutional Rights arguments, have distorted citizens' rights by defining them in terms of their value to commerce. But just as alarming is how tenuous the major legislation protecting our democratic rights becomes when based on the Commerce Clause and not grounded in legal rights.Morris also shows how the courts have ruled time and again against local attempts to control large corporations. From efforts to protect public health in the face of slaughter house abuses in the nineteenth century to attempts at regulating wages and hours of migrant workers in the present, the Commerce Clause has been used in favor of corporate interests.Gaveling Down the Rabble describes the development of this national "free trade" zone through Supreme Court decisions over many decades The idea that we live in a "free trade" zone is a commonplace among legal historians. "Supreme Court Justices have been intoning it like a mantra for over a century," Morris writes.She makes the case that the U.S. Supreme Court has subverted our representative government through narrow rulings based on the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause -- creating a hidden domestic "free trade" zone as undemocratic as the global "free trade" zone. Using this clause, the Court has incrementally built a large -- and growing -- body of law favoring large corporate interests over the rights of states, municipalities, labor, minorities and the environment.She finds it astonishing that "a fact so present in legal discourse" is so absent from public debate. This book is her attempt to stimulate that debate.

Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415926324
Category : Critical pedagogy
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: Charles Conrad
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444338633
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Surveying a wide variety of disciplines, this fully-revised 7th edition offers a sophisticated and engaging treatment of the rapidly expanding field of organizational communication Places organizations and organizational communication within a broader social, economic, and cultural context Applies a global perspective throughout, including thoughtful consideration of non-Western forms of leadership, as well as global economic contexts Offers a level of sophistication and integration of ideas from a variety of disciplines that makes this treatment definitive Updated in the seventh edition: Coverage of recent events and their ethical dimensions, including the bank crisis and bailouts in the US and UK Offers a nuanced, in-depth discussion of technology, and a new chapter on organizational change Includes new and revised case studies for a fresh view on perennial topics, incorporating a global focus throughout Online Instructors' Manual, including sample syllabi, tips for using the case studies, test questions, and supplemental case studies

Author: Chuck Collins
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595587314
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This updated edition of the widely touted Economic Apartheid in America looks at the causes and manifestations of wealth disparities in the United States, including tax policy in light of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and recent corporate scandals. Published with two leading organizations dedicated to addressing economic inequality, the book looks at recent changes in income and wealth distribution and examines the economic policies and shifts in power that have fueled the growing divide. Praised by Sojurners as “a clear blueprint on how to combat growing inequality,” Economic Apartheid in America provides “much-needed groundwork for more democratic discussion and participation in economic life” (Tikkun). With “a wealth of eye-opening data” (The Beacon) focusing on the decline of organized labor and civic institutions, the battle over global trade, and the growing inequality of income and wages, it argues that most Americans are shut out of the discussion of the rules governing their economic lives. Accessible and engaging and illustrated throughout with charts, graphs, and political cartoons, the book lays out a comprehensive plan for action.