A forceful argument for genuine business accountability.
How profits can follow responsible business practices.
Business professor, lecturer, and Forbes columnist Marquis mounts a sharp critique of businesses that have hidden the negative social and environmental impacts of the ways they produce and deliver their products and services. “Behind a smoke screen of rhetoric about individual responsibility and personal choice,” writes the author, “corporations and their leaders ruthlessly pursue their own interests, shifting the blame for the harms they cause onto society at large.” These businesses typically use two strategies to deflect responsibility for environmental pollution, labor exploitation, and systemic discrimination: gaslighting, which presents “a false view of reality with the aim of convincing the ‘victim’ (i.e. us) that they are responsible for a wrong that the gaslighter committed,” and greenwashing, whereby companies publicize an ecologically sound image—a new logo or advertising slogan—“while continuing to operate in the same dirty way they always have.” Marquis points out, for example, the “big lie” told by the Plastics Industry Association about recycling: Most plastics are not recyclable, instead ending up in landfills. In presenting practical ideas for reform, Marquis sees a growing movement from “a linear ‘take, make, waste’ orientation to one where virtuous cycles drive positive change.” Among many companies working to eliminate pollution and reduce their carbon footprints are the shoe manufacturer Allbirds, furniture superstore IKEA, personal care enterprise Dr. Bronner’s, household cleaning supply company Seventh Generation, and clothing manufacturer Patagonia. The establishment of benefit corporations and B-corporate certification has spread internationally as a result of shareholder activism and corporate collaboration. In addition to programs for recycling and reuse, many companies are actively promoting reduced consumption. “Doing well by doing good,” Marquis reveals, “is an easy pill for the public to swallow, and companies know this.”
A forceful argument for genuine business accountability.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781541703520
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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