Taming the Octopus
The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation
$41.53
- Hardcover
304 pages
- Release Date
29 March 2024
Summary
Recent controversies around ESG investing and “woke” capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, in fact, the notion that business leaders could benefit society had become a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history shows, New Deal liberalism realized a kind of big business supervision narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become orthodoxy: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to seatbelts to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximize value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, “stakeholder capitalism,” still dominates our headlines today. Williams’s necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393867237 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0393867234 |
| Author: | Kyle Edward Williams |
| Publisher: | WW Norton & Co |
| Imprint: | WW Norton & Co |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 304 |
| Release Date: | 29 March 2024 |
| Weight: | 534g |
| Dimensions: | 28mm x 160mm x 236mm |
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Critics Review
Do the huge corporations that now so control our economy and pollute our politics have any obligations other than the pursuit of profit? Taming the Octopus tells the surprising, chilling story of how America originally had, then lost, then gained again, and then surrendered protections–even from the Goliaths now fueling authoritarianism and ecological collapse.–Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Fascinating and timely, Taming the Octopus is a revelatory history of the fight to make corporations more responsible to their stakeholders, and to the larger society. Kyle Edward Williams shows that social responsibility has been imposed on corporations not primarily by liberal reformers from the outside but often by business leaders themselves. A must-read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of corporate capitalism.–Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Kyle Edward Williams
Kyle Edward Williams, a historian of the modern United States, is senior editor of the Hedgehog Review and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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