A well-researched, absorbing, and balanced case for corporate-activist partnerships.
A legal scholar examines the growing phenomenon of corporate activism.
In this debut book, Lin—a law professor at Temple University and Academic Fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Law, Economics & Finance—suggests that “too often the stories of activists and capitalists are told as disparate, unrelated stories of distinct tribes.” With an expert’s grasp on current trends in corporate America, the author instead sees the “new reality of corporate social activism” and the “interplay between capitalists and activists” as an important 21st-century development. Nearly every major corporation, for instance, has formal “social responsibility programs,” and Fortune 500 companies have pumped billions of dollars into these campaigns since 2020 alone. The intertwining of grassroots and corporate activism can be seen in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida. At the same time, gun control activists, many of them students who survived the shooting, organized the “March for Our Lives” protest in Washington, D.C., and America’s largest banks cut their financial ties to gun manufacturers who made bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. Corporate influence on social issues comes as no surprise to Lin, who describes in an accessible and rigorous narrative how government policies in the 1970s and ’80s and Supreme Court cases like Citizens Unitedhave transformed companies into “private empires.” And though there is a “danger of corporate whitewashing” by using social justice campaigns to divert attention from “problematic business practices,” the author by and large sees the intersection of social consciousness and capitalism as a positive development that leads to “Better Activism” and “Better Business.” Thus, while recognizing corporate bad actors like former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, the engrossing book often gives entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt. Many moderates and neoliberals will share the eloquent volume’s optimistic sentiments as well as embrace its support of both free market capitalism and social justice reforms. But those outside the ideological mainstream may find this work a frustrating read—from those on the right like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who rail against “corporate communism” to those on the left whose plans for systemic reform include dismantling corporations.
A well-researched, absorbing, and balanced case for corporate-activist partnerships.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-52-309199-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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