{"product_id":"taming-the-octopus-the-long-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-corporation","title":"Taming the Octopus","description":"Recent controversies around ESG investing and “woke” capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By the twentieth century, 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 realised 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 maximise 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.","brand":"WW Norton \u0026 Co","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54006999351640,"sku":null,"price":28.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780393867237.jpg?v=1764469842","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/taming-the-octopus-the-long-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-corporation","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}