American Business and Society

The following textbook is meant to be an introductory textbook in American business and society for students with no background in the subject. The main focus is on the new economic and business structures which revolutionized American society, mainly the rise of the limited liability corporation and monopoly and oligopoly capitalism. An important part of the text is a discussion of how the seeds of the Great Depression were planted in the economic history of the 1920's. Then, after examining the causes of the Great Depression in some detail, the textbook examines the new economic policy of the Great Deal and its underlying economic philosophy of Keynesian economics. Part II of the textbook then takes a different approach, adopting an explicitly sociological perspective. Specifically the focus is on exploitation of workers and on the natural environment. The perspective adopted here reiterates that of the sociologist Joel Bakan who argues that corporate wrongdoing is not the isolated result of "a few bad apples, but that there is something in the nature of the institution itself which tends to sublimate human social needs to the imperatives of the bottom line. However, in order to present a more balanced view, Part III of the textbook looks at some new business models which explicitly reject the "profits over people" orientation we see in the history of American business. Specifically we look at some companies which are highly innovative, and perhaps more importantly, are humanistic and ecologically conscious (i.e., "green"). Rather than ending the textbook on a pessimistic note such as an anti-globalism message, we suggest the possibility that a restructured modern business corporation with a socially responsible corporate philosophy, instead of destroying people and things through its "externalities," might actualize the imperatives of ecological sustainability and the desire for a non-exploitive (i.e., humanistic) social-global system.原著Original国立情報学研究所で電子