Corporate power: benign or malignant?

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is fast becoming a fashionable phrase among businessrnen, managers, management academics, economists, politicians, and the public at large. Before these diverse groups plunge into serious debate on this crucial issue, one could perhaps learn from the long experience of western countries, especially the U. S., on this subject. A detailed scrutiny of a selected sample of western thought showed that two different and distinct groups existed. It was significant to find economists, lawyers, and political thinkers in the former group looking at the corporation mostly from outside, and teachers, researchers, and counsellors to the corporate sector in the latter group looking at the corporation from within. The former group, called externalists, has wielded better influence with policymakers in government and the latter, called managerialists, has influenced decisionmakers in corporations. The four—externalists, government, managerialists, and corporation—have continued to function as two parallel axes: the externalists-government axis almost always confronting the managerialists-corporation axis.