Can profits and ethics coexist? is a book review I found at the Christian Science Monitor about Daniel Yankelovich's Profit with Honor: The New Stage of Market Capitalism.
Fighting such trends with laws and compliance structures isn't enough. "If you want positive results," he writes, "you need to give people a positive basis for trust and respect and an ethical vision to live by, not merely severe punishment for misdeeds."
Fair enough. But how? Unlike many laments about corporate malfeasance that are awash with diagnoses but scant on prescriptions, this book steers directly toward a concept that Yankelovich describes as "stewardship ethics." He sees it as "a new stage of enlightened self-interest" that brings social norms together with business imperatives, focuses on community, and "emphasizes the conscious effort required to reconcile profitability with social good."
Yankelovich locates his concept between two popular but (in his view) flawed theories about business ethics. One is a laissez-faire approach that assumes "all reasonably honest ways of making profit somehow serve the public good" with no additional ethical imperatives required. The other is a corporate social responsibility approach. Arising from the nonprofit sector, this theory finds profitmaking suspect, and seeks to burden business with the correction of social ills unrelated to its core objectives.
I expect the book in the mail next week.
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