This was a good analysis. I have come to see Lionel Page, David Pinsof, and Dan Williams as forming a category of interesting truth-seeking philosophers on Substack. Pinsof is still probably my favorite due to his darkness and cynicism. A David Pinsof essay makes Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" look like Barney and Friends.
I worked for a few years for a Polish branch of an US corporation that heavily pushed the DEI agenda. FYI Poland is pretty conservative compared to US, the woke views are typically considered fringe and outlandish up here. There is only one leftist party which parrots the US woke narrative with ~10% of the popular vote (mostly from women 25 and under).
Sometimes, I would see managers from my company bragging about going to Gay Pride parades on social media and I be like: "WTF are they doing? Are they gay? They have wives!". Now, I kind of get what was the game they were playing.
>> We should be skeptical of the people who claim to speak on behalf of these communities.
>> Instead of looking to self proclaimed leaders of various marginalized and dispossessed groups, we need to actually ask those groups themselves.
>> It’s worth collecting data, looking at surveys, speaking with people — not just community leaders and activists who have their own agendas.
>> I saw this at Yale where someone who shares the characteristics of a historically mistreated group would claim to speak on behalf of them, but they had very little in common with them other than the way that they looked.
>> I want people to be a bit more skeptical of the self-proclaimed activist leaders who could be trying to push an agenda, trying to elicit sympathy, and trying to exploit people’s concerns.
Both this and the stakeholder capitalism could be framed as a single problem called "woke activism" and then discussed separately to expose, attack and destroy the status game these people are playing.
A nice refresher - thanks for keeping the flickering ember of skepticism alive in The Year of Our Corporate Overlords 2024. Perhaps one day, long after their comprehensive cleansing of public consciousness seems done, a bright and inquisitive soul will stumble on this piece and a light bulb will go on in their head, a flicker of doubt cast on the grand project of turning us all into the worker bee consumers they mean us to be…
While this article provides some limited insights into corporate motivation to engage in altruism, it demonstrates unfortunate ignorance of the corporate landscape, especially in the US. As I've learned over two decades creating corporate partnerships for nonprofit initiatives, they are no monotype. They are as diverse as people. I'm no corporate apologist: some (too many, indeed) are led by manipulative narcissists who traffic in the patina of social good to drive profit. But the author fails to communicate how many others genuinely put people, planet and purpose on equal footing with profit. These corporations deliver more positive social impact from their businesses than many nonprofits and gov't agencies. They are hybrids social enterprises, such as Social Purpose Corporations and LC3's, that blend profit with social impact. Consider d.light. That's a highly profitable corporation that belies every point made in this entire article. Anyhow, a more nuanced and thorough understanding of the diversity in the corporate landscape would make many of the easy generalities in this article impossible.
Thanks for engaging, Donald. You say that "many others genuinely put people, planet, and purpose on equal footing with profit." I would not disagree with that. One question, though, would be how such motives can survive and drive decisions in a social environment where incentives are structured in a way that ignores these considerations. Also, given that social motives are nice to put forward, it is healthy to question these, not to be naive with corporate narratives (which I take it you are not). Finally, even if some in managerial positions are primarily idealists (which I believe is possible), it does not eliminate the concern about the democratic issues raised by having firms take political sides. Leading liberal thinkers like Mill, Rawls, or Dahl have pointed to the non-democratic aspects of firms. If a firm takes a public position on political issues, it raises a concern about the freedom of its employees to express divergent opinions publicly.
An interesting but incomplete analysis. Who are these stakeholders? They are highly organized groups that reflect the narrow set of interests of their employees and donors (think NGOs). The choices here are shareholder value, management interests, or the interests of highly organized very narrow interests. The agency costs here fall on shareholders to the benefit of either managers or organized groups. Lionel Page is rarely naive about politics; here he needed a realistic analysis of a particular term of bullshit art: "stakeholder."
Hi John. The piece does not advocate for "stakeholder capitalism"; instead, it highlights the emptiness of the term as it is currently used. A proper discussion about the ideal governance of firms and the inclusion of "stakeholders" is beyond the scope of this piece. I may revisit this later as it is a very interesting question. And, as you rightly point out, one should not be naive about the governance issues that stakeholder capitalism would raise.
That's a very interesting piece, but I feel it's missing a couple of pieces: one is given by the other commenter below, Donald, so I am not going into that; the other is how much this "corporate niceness" is simply driven by fear of bad press, which can have very serious repercussions for an organization.
A company that becomes known for being close-minded, or having a non-inclusive work culture, might suffer from a lack of talent willing to work for them. That has very real long-term consequences for the capability to innovate and stay at the top of their ecosystem. Boycotts may also harm a firm substantially; you have shown the Bud Light case, but the opposite can happen from the other side.
Basically, my point is: much of this culture is due to a dominant cultural attitude, that has trickled down to corporations as well. The management's behavior only has a minor influence, I believe.
I think that is totally right. The cultural context shapes the cost and benefits for firms and managers. This perspective is compatible with the piece in the sense that the cultural context may make pro-social actions more profitable for firms and more status enhancing for managers. Why and how cultural contexts can have such effects is an interesting question that would deserve another post.
Essentially, it doesn't matter what you really believe in because if there's a prevailing belief and you do not follow it within your organization, you WILL be penalized no matter what.
This was a good analysis. I have come to see Lionel Page, David Pinsof, and Dan Williams as forming a category of interesting truth-seeking philosophers on Substack. Pinsof is still probably my favorite due to his darkness and cynicism. A David Pinsof essay makes Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" look like Barney and Friends.
I worked for a few years for a Polish branch of an US corporation that heavily pushed the DEI agenda. FYI Poland is pretty conservative compared to US, the woke views are typically considered fringe and outlandish up here. There is only one leftist party which parrots the US woke narrative with ~10% of the popular vote (mostly from women 25 and under).
Sometimes, I would see managers from my company bragging about going to Gay Pride parades on social media and I be like: "WTF are they doing? Are they gay? They have wives!". Now, I kind of get what was the game they were playing.
Also, the stakeholder capitalism part sounds a lot like how Rob Henderson described self-proclaimed minority activists at elite universities ( https://nypost.com/2024/02/17/us-news/foster-kid-who-went-to-yale-says-family-trumps-college/ ):
>> We should be skeptical of the people who claim to speak on behalf of these communities.
>> Instead of looking to self proclaimed leaders of various marginalized and dispossessed groups, we need to actually ask those groups themselves.
>> It’s worth collecting data, looking at surveys, speaking with people — not just community leaders and activists who have their own agendas.
>> I saw this at Yale where someone who shares the characteristics of a historically mistreated group would claim to speak on behalf of them, but they had very little in common with them other than the way that they looked.
>> I want people to be a bit more skeptical of the self-proclaimed activist leaders who could be trying to push an agenda, trying to elicit sympathy, and trying to exploit people’s concerns.
Both this and the stakeholder capitalism could be framed as a single problem called "woke activism" and then discussed separately to expose, attack and destroy the status game these people are playing.
A nice refresher - thanks for keeping the flickering ember of skepticism alive in The Year of Our Corporate Overlords 2024. Perhaps one day, long after their comprehensive cleansing of public consciousness seems done, a bright and inquisitive soul will stumble on this piece and a light bulb will go on in their head, a flicker of doubt cast on the grand project of turning us all into the worker bee consumers they mean us to be…
While this article provides some limited insights into corporate motivation to engage in altruism, it demonstrates unfortunate ignorance of the corporate landscape, especially in the US. As I've learned over two decades creating corporate partnerships for nonprofit initiatives, they are no monotype. They are as diverse as people. I'm no corporate apologist: some (too many, indeed) are led by manipulative narcissists who traffic in the patina of social good to drive profit. But the author fails to communicate how many others genuinely put people, planet and purpose on equal footing with profit. These corporations deliver more positive social impact from their businesses than many nonprofits and gov't agencies. They are hybrids social enterprises, such as Social Purpose Corporations and LC3's, that blend profit with social impact. Consider d.light. That's a highly profitable corporation that belies every point made in this entire article. Anyhow, a more nuanced and thorough understanding of the diversity in the corporate landscape would make many of the easy generalities in this article impossible.
Thanks for engaging, Donald. You say that "many others genuinely put people, planet, and purpose on equal footing with profit." I would not disagree with that. One question, though, would be how such motives can survive and drive decisions in a social environment where incentives are structured in a way that ignores these considerations. Also, given that social motives are nice to put forward, it is healthy to question these, not to be naive with corporate narratives (which I take it you are not). Finally, even if some in managerial positions are primarily idealists (which I believe is possible), it does not eliminate the concern about the democratic issues raised by having firms take political sides. Leading liberal thinkers like Mill, Rawls, or Dahl have pointed to the non-democratic aspects of firms. If a firm takes a public position on political issues, it raises a concern about the freedom of its employees to express divergent opinions publicly.
“Corporatism has been for some time the only real threat to democracy. That explains why our corporatist elites never discuss it.”
— from the entry for Corporatism in The Doubter’s Companion (John Ralston Saul)
An interesting but incomplete analysis. Who are these stakeholders? They are highly organized groups that reflect the narrow set of interests of their employees and donors (think NGOs). The choices here are shareholder value, management interests, or the interests of highly organized very narrow interests. The agency costs here fall on shareholders to the benefit of either managers or organized groups. Lionel Page is rarely naive about politics; here he needed a realistic analysis of a particular term of bullshit art: "stakeholder."
Hi John. The piece does not advocate for "stakeholder capitalism"; instead, it highlights the emptiness of the term as it is currently used. A proper discussion about the ideal governance of firms and the inclusion of "stakeholders" is beyond the scope of this piece. I may revisit this later as it is a very interesting question. And, as you rightly point out, one should not be naive about the governance issues that stakeholder capitalism would raise.
That's a very interesting piece, but I feel it's missing a couple of pieces: one is given by the other commenter below, Donald, so I am not going into that; the other is how much this "corporate niceness" is simply driven by fear of bad press, which can have very serious repercussions for an organization.
A company that becomes known for being close-minded, or having a non-inclusive work culture, might suffer from a lack of talent willing to work for them. That has very real long-term consequences for the capability to innovate and stay at the top of their ecosystem. Boycotts may also harm a firm substantially; you have shown the Bud Light case, but the opposite can happen from the other side.
Basically, my point is: much of this culture is due to a dominant cultural attitude, that has trickled down to corporations as well. The management's behavior only has a minor influence, I believe.
I think that is totally right. The cultural context shapes the cost and benefits for firms and managers. This perspective is compatible with the piece in the sense that the cultural context may make pro-social actions more profitable for firms and more status enhancing for managers. Why and how cultural contexts can have such effects is an interesting question that would deserve another post.
I agree with this take.
Essentially, it doesn't matter what you really believe in because if there's a prevailing belief and you do not follow it within your organization, you WILL be penalized no matter what.
It's dangerous.