Rethinking Corporate Power to Tackle Grand Societal Challenges: Lessons from Political Philosophy

Abstract

We review three books that examine three interrelated grand challenges: climate change, abusive power in the workplace, and unfair international trading relations. The main take-away is that decision makers’ moral compass is centrally important to bring about more equitable and sustainable outcomes. Although the three books differ in structure and style, the shared wisdom that emerges from them is that we should abandon utilitarian approaches and embrace morality and self-governance at both the individual and organizational level in order to overcome the profit-making logic that dominates much of corporate action in today’s capitalist systems.