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Corporations and the Common Good

Corporations and the Common Good

Edited by Robert B. Dickie and Leroy S. Rouner

160 pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in, 1 chart and 1 table

Paperback

Published: January 1987

ISBN 9780268007614

$30.00

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Hardcover

Published: April 1986

ISBN 9780268007546

$100.00

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Multinational corporations are highly regarded by some as the crowning achievement of American enterprise. For a significant and increasingly vocal group of Americans, however, the large corporation inspires suspicion if not outright hostility.

While some share these suspicions, the contributors to this volume are persuaded that the large corporation is not only here to stay, as Kenneth Mason argues, but has become the definitive institution of modern Western culture. The large corporation dominates the modern world in much the same way that the church and the university dominated the medieval world. Corporations and the Common Good clarifies the suspicions about how corporations came to be, what makes them work, and what needs to be done to change them and their impact on our society.

These were the questions which motivated a colloquium at Boston University on what we chose to call "The Philosophy of the Large Corporation." That enigmatic title was their way of avoiding another conference on "business ethics" and inaugurating a too-brief, admittedly rough-edged, but nevertheless serious attempt to find out how large corporations affect the common good in our culture. The colloquium was sponsored jointly by Boston University's Institute for Philosophy and Religion and its School of Management.

Robert B. Dickie, a member of the State Bars of California, Massachusetts and New York, practiced law at Shearman & Sterling, has served as a tenured professor at Boston University’s School of Management and as a faculty member at Stanford Law School’s Directors’ College. A graduate of Yale University, he earned a J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He authored Financial Statement Analysis and Business Valuation for the Practical Lawyer, published by the ABA and its best seller in 1999 (2nd edition 2006), recently released in its 3rd version (2020).

Leroy S. Rouner (d. 2006) was the Professor of Philosophy, Religion and Philosophical Theology and Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University. He edited a number of books and is the author of Within Human Experience: The Philosophy of William Ernest Hocking and To Be at Home: Christianity, Civil Religion and World Community.

"...a well-organized collection of searching essays. It tracks the broad field of business ethics from system to corporation to person and is a valuable contribution to the literature." —Kenneth E. Goodpaster, Harvard University

"Corporations and the Common Good claims such eminent contributors as Peter Berger, Robert Heilbroner, George C. Lodge, James E. Post, Kenneth Mason, Peter Jones, and Edwin A. Murray, Jr. It examines facets of the complex, and often vexing, relationship between big business and the society it functions in." –The Boston Globe

"Corporations and the Common Good, a short collection of essays edited by Boston University professors Robert B. Dickie and Leroy S. Rouner, provides an engaging entree into this new sub-basement of societal theory. While questions of front-line tactics (When does a commission become a bribe?) get some passing attention—much of the book relates to a fundamental question—whether the 'private' agenda of the corporation is now obsolete in our interdependent world of unstable nuclear reactors and industrial contaminants....The sharpest essay come from Kenneth Mason, former president of Quaker Oats. Readable, concrete, and incisive, Mason's essay, castigates corporate leaders from inside the club.... Mason's essay, like much else in Corporations and the Common Good, reminds us that the principle laid down by Chief Justice Marshall cuts both ways. If corporations are simply what the law says they are, then an angry society may someday strip them of the very unnatural right to focus only on profit." –The Philadelphia Inquirer