{"product_id":"taming-the-octopus","title":"Taming the Octopus","description":"\u003cp\u003eRecent controversies around ESG investing and \"woke\" capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, in fact, the notion that business leaders could benefit society had become a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams's brilliant history shows, New Deal liberalism realized a kind of big business supervision narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become orthodoxy: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to seatbelts to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximize value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, \"stakeholder capitalism,\" still dominates our headlines today. Williams's necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy's tangled relationship with capitalism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kyle Edward Williams","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42849111113789,"sku":"9780393867237","price":44.96,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/7689\/2989\/files\/9780393867237_3b94cd36-37f3-41b0-b024-ac890a58c9a4.jpg?v=1766994150","url":"https:\/\/www.palmleaf.com.au\/products\/taming-the-octopus","provider":"Palmleaf","version":"1.0","type":"link"}