|
this just seems like one of those days in which nothing is gonna happen for me in 3-d. what am i still doing here?
anyway: mr. jazz.
1. if you are going to adopt the miltonfreidman position about the role of the corporation (to make profit for shareholders etc.) then it is obvious that your position about business ethics would be. the whole business of business ethics is a huge reaction against freidman. even the terminology fight over whether one should refer to shareholders or stakeholders indicates this.
2. there is no business ethics in general. there are lots of claims floating around about what a business ethics in general should look like, but no consensus about which of these positions is most compelling. personally, i tend to favor sustainability criteria--which embody ethical positions--because i think (a) the past 30 years of neoliberalism has shown pretty clearly that the friedman position is bad ideology: bad for business, bad for states, bad for transnational institutions; (b) firms are blind to all sorts of consequences to their actions...bounded rationality is the sociological term that i think explains it best...so while i makes some sense that a firm would not explicitly decide to fuck up the social situation in country x, often you find firms doing it anyway.
how is that?
they exclude social consequences from their calculations, from their decision-making process.
what enables this? the boundedness of the internal rationality. if firm x is internally committed to a 1-dimensional profit-uber-alles worldview, and this worldview is knit into the administrative culture of the firm, it would follow that it'd be easy peasy to ignore any number of social consequences to their business decisions. the problem then is the rationality itself.
in the initial phases of globalizing capitalism, neoliberalism enabled firms to treat the entire fucking planet as one huge industrial reserve army, put all social consequences to business decisions into the externalities box and just pull up stakes and move somewhere else when the shit hit the fan. when they couldnt do that, for whatever reason, often they would simply lie (unocal in burma/myanmar, royal dutch shell in nigeria are good examples)--until the political consequences of lying became great enough that these firms were forced--and i mean forced--to change course. unocal went under ultimately: royal dutch shell is still doing more or less what it was doing before, and every last annual report has some myustifying blurb about the "war on terror" in nigeria. what a great bunch of guys--well, as individuals, the folk in either of these firms were probably no better or worse than anyone else: but within the bounded rationality of the firms, they were frankly irresponsible and dangerous people whose actions resulted in significant human rights abuses (you know: torture, rape, death, all those nice things.)
2a: i think another way of looking at the scenario pan outlined above is to see it as an index of the collapse of an older *political* consensus (fordism)--it is not that people suddenyl became greedy when before they weren't--rather they operated under a different set of political rules that they found no longer obtained. given the appalling neoliberalism of the reagan period (and after) it followed that corporations would interpret the collapse of this political consensus as authorization for anything goes. the people were the same on either side of the collapse. the rules changed because the political context changed.
there's more, but i have to get off this machine before i start thinking that my entire day has been sucked into it.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|