THE LIMITS OF CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY

What can the large corporation do about the social problems of our times. . ."" -- consumer fraud, pollution, hard-core unemployment, urban blight, governmental giantism, coups and counter coups, the wretched peoples of the earth? Use its power for the commonweal? Cooperate in designing a more congruent and beneficent social order in which General Motors is an avuncular cog? Neither, Chamberlain, Columbia Business School Professor and social commentator (Beyond Malthus, 1970) declares in this blinder-free, bubble-pricking if somewhat academic book -- there are definite limits to corporate maneuverability as long as it's business' business to supply a consumer society with reasonably priced goods at a profit to itself. ""By insisting that the value of all things can be measured in money. . . economists have simply claimed more from the price system than it can deliver""; we've got our two-car garages and TVs in many rooms, but meaningless work, alienated and angry minorities, a second-rate ""Chevrolet"" environment, traffic-jammed freeways, and shoddy and undesired goods lying on our doorsteps. There's no way to nationalize industry, to set up workers' control, to have the state become a supra-controlling agency because there is no will; Naderist legislative regulation will be either weak enough to tolerate reformist do-little pieties or too strong to be enforceable; unions will not allow their industry to be hobbled; stockholders, concerned about performance, are content to keep management in its present hands. Our hopes, then, must be as limited as the possibilities for progress -- that the corporate hierarchy can become reponsible to its entire constituency, including those groups dissenting from its values. Chamberlain says in the crunch the responsibility is ours, and rightly.