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What was once taboo — faith at work — is increasingly accepted in corporate America. From secretaries to CEOs, growing numbers of businesspeople today want to bring their faith to work. Yet they wrestle with how to do this effectively and appropriately in a pluralistic corporate setting. For help they turn not to their clergy, but to their peers and to a burgeoning cottage industry on spirituality at work. They attend conferences and seminars, participate in Bible study and prayer groups, and read books, blogs, and eNewsletters. They see their faith as a resource for ethical guidance and to help find meaning and purpose in their work. This book looks at how this Faith at Work movement developed and considers its potential value for business and society. Done well, the integration of faith and work has positive implications at the personal level, as well as for corporate ethics and the broader economic sphere. At the same time, increasing expressions of religion and spiritual practices at work also present the threat of divisiveness and discrimination.

This book focuses on the relationship between conservative Protestants and social power in the U.S. The book, which is particularly concerned with which sorts of power relationships seem natural and which do not, is based on fieldwork (conducted in the early 1990s), in three Philadelphia churches: Oak Grove Church, Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Church of Christ. The data drawn from that fieldwork suggests that in the early 1990s, Bible‐carrying Christian churches tended to naturalize (to various degrees) the authority of heterosexuals and men. The data also suggested that under certain (relatively rare) circumstances Bible‐carrying Christian churches denaturalized the authority of ministers, corporations, and nation‐states.

A closely held firm is not a smaller version of a large public firm, anymore than a child is a miniature adult. While realizing that like large corporations, value comes from a business' ability to generate future cash flows, this book emphasize the differences between the two. The primary question is does a separate entity exist or is the business just an extension of its principal owner or manager? If yes, how does this business vary from a large publicly traded firm with market and not management control? This book gets to the fundamental differences between the two and the adjustments made to value correctly. It avoids the traditional multiples of earnings or multiple of sales and other cookie-cutter approaches, to focus on the basic ability to create value. The book also avoids specifics in tax laws as they change and vary between countries.

In the modern world, there is no shortage of people who know what is best for others. Self-appointed experts, consultants, and organizations try to convince states, corporations, and individuals that they would be better off if they only followed some specific rules about what to do. These rules are presented as being voluntary and advisory. They are standards, not mandatory directives, and they abound in modern life. Standards may concern what characteristics a telephone should have, how a company should report its financial transactions, how organizations should be managed, how states should treat their citizens, how children should be raised, and so forth. Even organizations as powerful as states and large corporations follow standards on how to organize, which policies to pursue, what kinds of services to provide, or how their products should be designed. Standards enable a higher degree of global order in the modern world than would exist without them. They facilitate coordination and cooperation even among people and organizations that are far apart. The book states that standardization is a much neglected area of social science — an area that has by no means received the attention it deserves in view of its importance to society. This book redresses the balance by providing an in-depth examination of a number of aspects of standardization, how it is formed, and what effects it has on the world in which we live.

This book examines the highly topical question of the current and future role of international environmental law in directing and controlling the environmental conduct of business enterprises, in particular multinational corporations. It replies to this question through the identification of corporate accountability standards and their implementation by international organizations. The book examines systematically all international sources of corporate accountability standards in the specific area of environmental protection and elaborates on their theoretical and practical implications for international environmental law. The book argues that although international environmental treaties do not bind multinational corporations and other business entities, growing international practice points to the emergence of legal standards that allow adapting and translating inter-State obligations embodied in international environmental law into specific normative benchmarks to determine the legitimacy of the conduct of the private sector against internationally recognized values and rules. The book also focuses on the role of international organizations in selecting international environmental standards and promote their application to business entities, in the absence of State intervention. The book analyses the growing practice of international organizations, which are driving a process of emergence of international standards for corporate environmental accountability. Furthermore, the impact of international organizations' direct relations with the private sector is also assessed, as it significantly contributes to ensuring that private companies comply with international environmental standards.

This book uses political philosophy to examine the role of the corporation in our culture and its place in creating The Good Society. This book aims to provide business leaders with a practical “compass” to help them navigate the turbulent waters of social change and political conflict. The device helps managers to identify the ideological origins of contemporary political disagreements and understand the philosophical and ethical sources of our differences of opinion about such issues as executive compensation, plant closings, and environmental regulation. The beauty of this “compass” is that it provides a framework for the executive to create order out of the growing chaos of cultural diversity and conflict of values. It is aimed at expanding understanding of the interrelationship of fundamental values.

The MBA is probably the hottest ticket among the current university graduate degree offerings—every year, more than 120,000 students enroll in MBA programs in the United States, and the estimates in Europe do not lag far behind. In addition, job prospects have never looked better for business-school graduates; corporations are hiring more business-school graduates every year, and compensating them more handsomely. This book is a review of the major contemporary debates on management education. At the same time, it makes a proposal that will certainly have an impact in business schools: that managers need to develop a series of qualitative tacit skills which could be appropriately developed by integrative curricula brought from different disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, and other social sciences. The book's authors, both involved in the integrative business-education program at the Rotheman School of Management, provide a guide on how to design a reliable integrated program for management students.

Forty years ago, managerialism dominated corporate governance. In both theory and practice, a team of senior managers ran the corporation with little or no interference from other stakeholders. Boards of directors were little more than rubber stamps. Today, corporate governance looks very different. In particular, several trends have coalesced to encourage more active and effective board oversight. Much director compensation is now paid in stock, for example, which helps align director and shareholder interests. Courts have made clear that effective board processes and oversight are essential if board decisions are to receive the deference traditionally accorded to them under the business judgment rule, especially insofar as structural decisions are concerned (such as those relating to management buy-outs). Third, director conduct is constrained by an active market for corporate control, ever-rising rates of shareholder litigation, and, some say, activist shareholders. As a result, modern boards of directors typically are smaller than their antecedents, meet more often, are more independent from management, own more stock, and have better access to information. This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the emerging board-centered system of corporate governance. It draws on doctrinal legal analysis, behavioral economic insights into how individuals and groups make decisions, the work of new institutional economics on organizational structure, and management studies of corporate governance. Using those tools, it traces the process by which this new corporate governance system emerged. How did we move from the managerial revolution famously celebrated by Alfred Chandler to the director independence model recently codified in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other post-Enron corporate governance mandates?

Global organizations are exercising unprecedented power–from the hallowed halls of the UN to the closed boardrooms of multinational corporations. Yet their leaders are often scandalously unaccountable to the people they claim to serve. How can we ensure that global leaders act responsively, and effectively, in the interests of the world’s people? In this lucid and provocative book, Andrew Kuper develops persuasive and practical answers.Democracy Beyond Borders criticizes conventional theories of justice and democracy that focus almost exclusively on the state and its electoral cycles. Kuper shows how non-state actors, such as corporations and civil society advocates, can be brought into multi-level government as partners with states. He presents an original theory of representation to answer the problem of accountability. At the core of this vision is a new separation of powers, in which different global actors check and balance one another in a complex harmony. This innovative framework complements electoral accountability and enables Kuper to recommend far-reaching reforms to the World Courts, the UN, and advocacy agencies including Transparency International.Democracy Beyond Borders stands at the forefront of a new generation of political thought, for which globalization is the challenge and deepening democracy the solution.

This book examines the effective governance, monitoring, and control of corporations and financial markets, drawing on the lessons of history and with a firm focus on the future. The book is divided into four parts. Part I consists of two chapters: the first considers the nature, effects, and consequences of the bubble of 1995-2000; the second chapter assesses the more fundamental effects related to the evolving dominance of capital markets, which has changed the way corporate executives perceive their role and the expectations they are required to meet. Part II consists of three chapters that explore the internal governance function of corporations. Part III includes three chapters that examine the modern roles and practices of institutional investors, auditors, and banks and brokerages in conducting the fiduciary and governance functions allocated to them in the capital-market system. Part IV examines the evolution of the legal and regulatory system supporting the markets, and focuses on its troubling impotence as a consequence of modern political realities. It analyzes how conflicts of interest have become a more serious threat to the well-being of the market system than before.