Search results for ""Author Evan Osborne""
Stanford University Press The Rise of the Anti-Corporate Movement: Corporations and the People who Hate Them
Against the backdrop of Enron and other high-profile cases of corporate malfeasance, it is easy to paint today's executives as villains--to blame big business, and corporations generally, for a wide array of social ills. Is the criticism warranted? Not quite, says Evan Osborne. In this provocative book, Osborne pulls back the curtain to illuminate how corporations have evolved as an essential element of society, and how opposition to them is out of proportion—a fire fanned by anti-business activists, the media, and other groups. He sets the record straight, explaining how corporations work and how they have evolved in the context of other institutions. He outlines the net benefits that corporations provide and where increasingly strident antibusiness arguments fail to stand up to scrutiny. The text investigates corporate influence over politics and the government; corporate influence in the media; corporate influence through marketing; some of the pros and cons of globalization; the extent to which business has responded to public demands for social responsibility; and the extent to which free commerce improves society. The result is a fascinating commentary on our love-hate relationship with business.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Self-Regulation and Human Progress: How Society Gains When We Govern Less
Most of us are familiar with free-market competition: the idea that society and the economy benefit when people are left to self-regulate, testing new ideas in pursuit of profit. Less known is the fact that this theory arose after arguments for the scientific method and freedom of speech had gone mainstream—and that all three share a common basis. Proponents of self-regulation in the realm of free speech have argued that unhindered public expression causes true ideas to gain strength through scrutiny. Similarly, scientific inquiry has been regarded as a self-correcting system, one in which competing hypotheses are verified by multiple independent researchers. It was long thought that society was better left to organize itself through free markets as opposed to political institutions. But, over the twentieth century, we became less confident in the notion of a self-regulating socioeconomy. Evan Osborne traces the rise and fall of this once-popular concept. He argues that—as society becomes more complex—self-regulation becomes more efficient and can once again serve our economy well.
£59.40
