Evil Corporations

Evil Corporations
Author: Penny Crofts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2024-07-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1040048242

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines. There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing. The book targets a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline, including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.

Industrial Society and the Science Fiction Blockbuster

Industrial Society and the Science Fiction Blockbuster
Author: Mark T. Decker
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476623872

Can blockbuster films be socially relevant or are they just escapist diversions to entertain the masses and enrich the studios? Not every successful film contains thoughtful commentary, but some that are marketed as pure entertainment do seriously engage social issues. Popular science fiction films of the late 1970s and early 1980s--such as George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Ridley Scott's Alien and Aliens, and James Cameron's Terminator films--present a critique of our engagement with technology in a way that resonates with 1960s counterculture. As challengers of the status quo's technological underpinnings, Luke Skywalker, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor echo the once-popular social criticism of philosopher Herbert Marcuse and speak directly to the concerns of people living in a technologically complex society. The films of Lucas, Scott and Cameron made money but also made us think about the world we live in.

Don't Be Evil

Don't Be Evil
Author: Rana Foroohar
Publisher: Currency
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 198482399X

A penetrating indictment of how today’s largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds—from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND EVENING STANDARD “Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth—while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don’t Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul—and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access—won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology—she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology. Praise for Don’t Be Evil “At first sight, Don’t Be Evil looks like it’s doing for Google what muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell did for Standard Oil over a century ago. But this whip-smart, highly readable book’s scope turns out to be much broader. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump’s election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed.”—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of The Square and the Tower

When Corporations Rule the World

When Corporations Rule the World
Author: David C. Korten
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1996-01
Genre: Big business
ISBN: 9781887208017

Addresses the issue of modern corporate power, exposing the harmful effects gobalization is having not only on economics, but also on politics, society and the environment

The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse

The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse
Author: Marianne M. Jennings
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2006-08-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1466824255

Do you want to make sure you · Don't invest your money in the next Enron? · Don't go to work for the next WorldCom right before the crash? · Identify and solve problems in your organization before they send it crashing to the ground? Marianne Jennings has spent a lifetime studying business ethics---and ethical failures. In demand nationwide as a speaker and analyst on business ethics, she takes her decades of findings and shows us in The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse the reasons that companies and nonprofits undergo ethical collapse, including: · Pressure to maintain numbers · Fear and silence · Young 'uns and a larger-than-life CEO · A weak board · Conflicts · Innovation like no other · Belief that goodness in some areas atones for wrongdoing in others Don't watch the next accounting disaster take your hard-earned savings, or accept the perfect job only to find out your boss is cooking the books. If you're just interested in understanding the (not-so) ethical underpinnings of business today, The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse is both a must-have tool and a fascinating window into today's business world.

The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility

The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility
Author: Steven K. May
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2007-04-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019803976X

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.

Trust Us, We're Experts!

Trust Us, We're Experts!
Author: Sheldon Rampton
Publisher: Tarcher
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"In Trust Us, We're Experts! journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber unmask the sneaky and widespread methods industry uses to influence opinion through bogus reports, doctored data, and manufactured facts. Rampton and Stauber show how corporations and public relations firms have seized upon remarkable new ways of exploiting your trust to get you to buy what they have to sell: letting you hear their pitch from a neutral third party, such as a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group." "The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged in order to make you believe what they say. In many cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Representation of Economics in Cinema

The Representation of Economics in Cinema
Author: Santiago Sanchez-Pages
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030801810

Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people’s views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of economics in cinema across a wide range of areas and genres, from the conflicts over resources in the lawless Old West to the post-scarcity societies of science fiction futures. This book studies how films have portrayed trade unions, scarcity, money, businesses, innovators, migrant workers, working women, globalization, the stock market, and the automation of work. It aims to be useful to those who are interested in cinema with economic themes and to those who want to learn about economics through cinema.

Corporate Dictatorship

Corporate Dictatorship
Author: Yasser Nafei
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Business ethics
ISBN: 9780982328743

Today's top business executives are like celebrities; they are the rock stars of capitalism and a cornerstone of public life. Unfortunately, we tend to think that their leadership is infallible. We never account for the fact that they may err, they can be biased, and it is normal that they have weaknesses and desires that can possibly be malicious. Unfortunately, many corporate empires are falling, taking with them billions of dollars of workers' hard-earned savings. Corporate Dictatorship is one of the first books to focus exclusively on the topic of dictatorships within organizations. The similarities among state leaders and many of today's corporate executives is intriguing--the way they manage their companies, treat their employees, communicate with investors, and deal with opposition and minority opinions. The book presents analysis and pragmatic governance ideas that prove that ethical leadership can simultaneously coexist with financial and market share leadership.

Realm of Lesser Evil

Realm of Lesser Evil
Author: Jean-Claude Michea
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2009-07-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0745646212

Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.