Beyond Success: Corporations and Their Critics in the 1990s (Ruffin Series in Business Ethics) (Hardcover)

Review

"First a fascinating, refreshing business history and second an exploration seeking a comprehensive ethic for the modern business world....The volume earns highest recommendation for its methodical but imaginative development of the background plus its evenhanded yet persistent probing of positions and its suggestions of criteria and philosophies."--Choice
"Beyond Success is by far the best book on business ethics and corporate responsibility I have ever read! It is analytically sophisticated yet pragmatic....For my money, [the] books is right on target!"--Thomas H. Naylor, Duke University
"Kuhn and Shriver have an excellent message. Let us hope that managers are listening and reading."--Jerome D. Simpson, The Christian Century
"In their book Beyond Success: Corporations and Their Critics in the 1990s, Kuhn and Shriver offer a compelling description of and prescription for the interface of future corporations and their constituents."--Journal of Management
"A richly written, evocative work with the dual authorship's seams plain to see and with passage after passage capturing attention, furnishing new insights, and justifying rereading."--Academy of Management Executive


Product Description
This book explores the opportunities and problems that corporate business managers and leaders of what the authors call corporate "constituencies" will confront over the next ten years as they seek their respective overlapping and conflicting goals. The authors define constituencies as internal groups like employees and external groups like shareholders, suppliers, and customers. But they also include new constituencies like consumerists, conservationists, racial and ethnic groups, the handicapped, social activists, and others who are affected by, and in turn affect, the corporation. The book begins by describing the origins of the new constituencies and their history to the present. It goes on to discuss how managers have responded to these new groups and explores managers' values, arguing that they profess a free market philosophy but lobby for governmental restraints to protect their markets. Finally, the authors detail the ways in which managers can come to a better understanding of their social responsibilities, and suggest a new style of responsiveness--of managers to constituencies and constituencies to managers--that should result in cooperative solutions to ethical problems.