This is a chronicle of American corporation's changing role, as well as a perceptive look at what these changes mean for business and public policy. It challenges companies and the government to consider practices and policies that will contribute to corporate viability and the health of society.

Here is the American corporation from every angle - its postwar history, its relation to the law, its financing, its impact on technological innovation, its role as employer and as political force, and much more. The contributors - all of whom are recognized experts in their fields - not only tackle many of the same key areas that the contributors to Mason's classic study looked at, but they also illuminate issues that have only arisen in recent years.

A fascinating assessment of the ethics program at Lockheed Martin, one of the world's largest defense contractors.

"This is the cutting-edge textbook on a managerial approach to corporate responsibility. Students and executives will benefit a great deal by studying the cases and best practices that are here. It’s a terrific book." —Ed Freeman, Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business, University of Virginia Corporate Responsibility offers a concise and comprehensive introduction to the functional area of corporate responsibility. Readers will learn how corporate responsibility is good for business and how leaders balance their organization’s needs with responsibilities to key constituencies in society. Author Paul A. Argenti engages students with new and compelling cases by focusing on the social, reputational, or environmental consequences of corporate activities. Students will learn how to make difficult choices, promote responsible behavior within their organizations, and understand the role personal values play in developing effective leadership skills.

Big business has been the lever of big change over time in American life, change in economy, society, politics, and the envelope of existence--in work, mores, language, consciousness, and the pace and bite of time. Such is the pattern revealed by this historical mosaic. --From the Preface Weaving historical source material with his own incisive analysis, Jack Beatty traces the rise of the American corporation, from its beginnings in the 17th century through today, illustrating how it has come to loom colossus-like over the economy, society, culture, and politics. Through an imaginative selection of readings made up of historical and contemporary documents, opinion pieces, reportage, biographies, company histories, and scenes from literature, all introduced and explicated by Beatty, Colossus makes a convincing case that it is the American corporation that has been, for good and ill, the primary maker and manager of change in modern America. In this anthology, readers are shown how a developing "business civilization" has affected domestic life in America, how labor disputes have embodied a struggle between freedom and fraternity, how corporate leaders have faced the recurring dilemma of balancing fiduciary with social responsibility, and how Silicon Valley and Wall Street have come to dwarf Capitol Hill in pervasiveness of influence. From the slave trade and the transcontinental railroad to the software giants and the multimedia conglomerates, Colossus reveals how the corporation emerged as the foundation of representative government in the United States, as the builder of the young nation's public works, as the conqueror of American space, and as the inexhaustible engine of economic growth from the Civil War to today. At the same time, Colossus gives perspective to the century-old debate over the corporation's place in the good society. A saga of freedom and domination, success and failure, creativity and conformity, entrepreneurship and monopoly, high purpose and low practice, Colossus is a major historical achievement.

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today’s corporate policy debates in proper context. From the nation’s founding to the present, Americans have regarded corporations with ambivalence—embracing their potential to revolutionize economic life and yet remaining wary of their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. Although corporations were originally created to give businesses and other associations special legal rights and privileges, historically they were denied many of the constitutional protections afforded flesh-and-blood citizens. This comprehensive volume covers a range of topics, including the origins of corporations in English and American law, the historical shift from special charters to general incorporation, the increased variety of corporations that this shift made possible, and the roots of modern corporate regulation in the Progressive Era and New Deal. It also covers the evolution of judicial views of corporate rights, particularly since corporations have become the form of choice for an increasing variety of nonbusiness organizations, including political advocacy groups. Ironically, in today’s global economy the decline of large, vertically integrated corporations—the type of corporation that past reform movements fought so hard to regulate—poses some of the newest challenges to effective government oversight of the economy.

Critics warn that corporate leaders have too much influence over American politics. Mark Mizruchi worries they exert too little. American CEOs have abdicated their civic responsibilities in helping the government address national challenges, with grave consequences for society. A sobering assessment of the dissolution of America’s business class.

A sequel to Civil Action-W.R. Grace company, owners of a vermiculite mine in that small Montana town, never told the miners what it knew: there was asbestos in the vermiculite, and the asbestos was destroying the miners lungs.

Just as one can destroy one's health, marriage, career, etc., CEOs and bankers can engage in behaviors and decisions that destroy the corporation they lead. For almost 25 years corporate America has resembled the Wild West. CEOs and their executives, Wall Street bankers, and others have been quietly engaged in terminating millions of jobs, stealing pensions, breaking up companies, committing fraud, outsourcing, and engaging in incomprehensible risk taking, all for the purpose of personal gain. It was blatant greed. And like most feeding frenzies it got out of control. Now, thanks to the greed demonstrated by executives at AIG, Merrill Lynch, Lehman and hundreds of other companies, Main Street America is finally outraged. It's as if Congress, journalists, pundits and even scholars have discovered that executives and bankers were cheating the system, and even in the midst of the present furor over pay, performance and bailouts, they cannot stop the greed, causing further outrage. We suggest that CEO greed has not only destroyed the American corporation, but it is responsible for the financial crises and a climate of mistrust that will take years if not decades to restore. We begin by explaining the scope of the CEO pay problem and what business schools did for the past 20 years to create the type of thinking that facilitates a culture of greed. In addition, we explore how CEOs engaged in an array of decisions that destroyed the employee-employer compact, destroyed customer service, outsourced and made themselves and stockholders wealthy. We then explain the psychological motivation to engage in unthinkable greed and how the tremendous effort an executive makes climbing the corporate ladder and then staying there leads to a psychological state of entitlement, guilt, and depersonalization in which the CEO looses empathy, and greed takes over as a defense. We then examine the nature of these problematic executive constellation cultures that become breeding grounds for greed, hubris and destruction. We discuss the psychology of the destruction of Lehman Brothers and then conduct an in-depth analysis of one of the most celebrated CEO's accused of greed and destructiveness, Bob Nardelli. the former CEO of Home Depot. This follows with a discussion of the new generation of employees, the Gen Ys, who will contribute to the demise of the American Corporation as we know it. The book ends with a discussion of what needs to be done to end unemployment and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. An extensive appendix presents the actual misdeeds and greedy acts of hundreds of CEOs.