Courteous Capitalism

Courteous Capitalism
Author: Daniel Robert
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421447355

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A provocative history of how corporate titans in the 1920s used a massive public relations campaign to transform public opinion on big business. In the early twentieth century, as Americans erupted in righteous indignation over the flagrant abuses of big business, utility executives faced an existential crisis. With calls for strict regulation or outright government ownership of utilities, how could streetcar, electricity, and telephone executives thwart municipal ownership, rein in regulation, and secure huge profits? In Courteous Capitalism, Daniel Robert reveals how utility executives answered this question by launching the largest nongovernmental public relations campaign the nation had ever seen. In part, this campaign encouraged managers to compel their clerks to exude "courtesy," "sunshine," and "patience" toward customers. Rather than bribe the few, executives would convert the many using a combination of emotional labor and improved customer service. At the same time, executives organized the widespread manipulation of the press, schools, radio, and movies. At once a labor history of clerks and a social history of consumers, Courteous Capitalism offers an intriguing new argument for why a major reform goal of Progressives faded and why Americans changed their minds regarding corporate monopolies.

Courteous Capitalism

Courteous Capitalism
Author: Daniel Robert
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1421447347

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"A study of how companies gained the public trust despite their monopoly status"--

Surveillance Capitalism in America

Surveillance Capitalism in America
Author: Josh Lauer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0812253353

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Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that a ubiquitous but often unseen surveillance infrastructure created by business and the state has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding.

Money, Power, and the People

Money, Power, and the People
Author: Christopher W. Shaw
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2019-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 022663633X

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Banks and bankers are hardly the most beloved institutions and people in this country. With its corruptive influence on politics and stranglehold on the American economy, Wall Street is held in high regard by few outside the financial sector. But the pitchforks raised against this behemoth are largely rhetorical: we rarely see riots in the streets or public demands for an equitable and democratic banking system that result in serious national changes. Yet the situation was vastly different a century ago, as Christopher W. Shaw shows. This book upends the conventional thinking that financial policy in the early twentieth century was set primarily by the needs and demands of bankers. Shaw shows that banking and politics were directly shaped by the literal and symbolic investments of the grassroots. This engagement remade financial institutions and the national economy, through populist pressure and the establishment of federal regulatory programs and agencies like the Farm Credit System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Shaw reveals the surprising groundswell behind seemingly arcane legislation, as well as the power of the people to demand serious political repercussions for the banks that caused the Great Depression. One result of this sustained interest and pressure was legislation and regulation that brought on a long period of relative financial stability, with a reduced frequency of economic booms and busts. Ironically, this stability led to the decline of the very banking politics that brought it about. Giving voice to a broad swath of American figures, including workers, farmers, politicians, and bankers alike, Money, Power, and the People recasts our understanding of what might be possible in balancing the needs of the people with those of their financial institutions.

Moral Capitalism

Moral Capitalism
Author: Stephen Young
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781576752579

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Shows how to ensure that capitalism promotes progress and equality rather than enriching the few at the expense of manyBased on principles developed by the Caux Round Table, an international network of senior business executives from such companies as 3M, Canon, NEC, Bankers Trust, Shell, Prudential, and dozens of other companiesProvides practical guidelines for corporate social responsibility through the Caux Round Table's Seven General Principles for BusinessThe world is drifting without a clear plan for its economic development. Communism is dead, but in the wake of Enron and similar scanda.

The 99 Percent Economy

The 99 Percent Economy
Author: Paul S. Adler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190931884

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The social, economic, and political challenges we face have reached the point of crisis: economic irrationality contributes to workplace disempowerment, social disintegration, political alienation, and environmental degradation. Despair is not an option.The 99 Percent Economy provides a stirring alternative: Democratic Socialism. Paul S. Adler, a leading business and management expert, argues that to overcome these crises we need to assert control over economic affairs through social ownership and democratic management of companies as well as thenational economy. He draws on a surprising source of inspiration: the strategic management techniques of large corporations. He shows how leading companies have designed and implemented strategies that involve and empower workers, enhance engagement and motivation, increase innovation, and areenvironmentally and socially sustainable. The principles are scalable - because they work in large corporations with thousands of people, they can work at local, regional, and national scales.Standing in the way? Private ownership of society's productive resources, the foundation of capitalism's ruthless competition and focus on individual gain at the cost of society, the environment, and future generations. Adler shows how socialize public ownership will merge individual and socialgoals through the democratic involvement of all people in deciding what the future will be-both political and economic, both local and global. The needs of people and the planet will guide decisions about investment and production, rather than the pursuit of profit. Public planning forums at theenterprise, regional, and national levels will democratically decide goals, instead of being the prerogative of CEOs doing the bidding of investors.Democratic socialism is not a leap into the entirely unknown, Adler shows. Capitalist industry has built the foundations for democratic socialism.

Saving Capitalism

Saving Capitalism
Author: Robert B. Reich
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0385350570

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Outlines how the American economic system is failing, with increasing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, and reveals how a market designed for broad prosperity can reverse the trend toward diminished opportunity. --Publisher.

Wealth and Justice

Wealth and Justice
Author: Peter Wehner
Publisher: Government Institutes
Total Pages: 91
Release: 2010-10-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 084474378X

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Popular opinion would have us believe that America's free market system is driven by greed and materialism, resulting in gross inequalities of wealth, destruction of the environment, and other social ills. Even proponents of capitalism often refer to the free market as simply a 'lesser evil' whose faults are preferable to those of social democracy or communism. But what if the conventional understanding of capitalism as corrupt and unprincipled is wrong? What if the free market economy actually reinforces Christian values? In Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, Arthur C. Brooks and Peter Wehner explore how America's system of democratic capitalism both depends upon and cultivates an intricate social web of families, churches, and communities. Far from oppressing and depriving individuals, the free market system uniquely enables Americans to exercise vocation and experience the dignity of self-sufficiency, all while contributing to the common good. The fruits of this system include the alleviation of poverty, better health, and greater access to education than at any other time in human history-but also a more significant prosperity: the flourishing of the human soul.

The Virtues of Capitalism

The Virtues of Capitalism
Author: Scott Rae
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 157567565X

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In the aftermath of the recent economic downturn, some observers leveled harsh criticism against free-market economies. In the spring of 2009, for instance, an article in the The London Telegraph insisted that the industrialized West must re-articulate its moral case for market capitalism. Additionally, numerous commentators proclaimed the days of unfettered markets to be over. In this timely and balanced book, Austin Hill and Scott Rae agree with capitalism's critics that the economy is essentially a moral issue, but they argue that free markets are by-and-large the solution to financial disasters rather than the cause. Though they recognize that there are legitimate criticisms of the market system -- and real limits to what it can and should accomplish -- the authors further conclude that capitalism both depends upon and sustains classic Judeo-Christian virtues better than any of its rival systems. Thoughtful and engaging, this book pushes against the tide of current public opinion and some of the administration's proposed economic policies with a principled defense of capitalism.