Business, Commerce, and Social Responsibility Beyond Agenda
Author: | Reeves-Ellington, Richard Anderson, Adele |
Year: | 1997 |
Pages: | 288 |
ISBN: | 0-7734-8442-6 978-0-7734-8442-9 |
Price: | $199.95 |
| |
This volume provides an integrated anthropological perspective for business organizations in the areas of social responsibility, leadership alternatives, collaborative action research. It is directed primarily to professionals, scholars, and students concerned about doing business responsibly within globalizing but culturally fragmented contexts. It brings anthropological insights to the cultural and moral aspects of business, with the ultimate aim of enabling people to work more effectively toward a reintegration of business and society.
Reviews
"This reader-friendly, well-structured, and substantive book proposes a new approach to social responsibility of transnational corporations operating in multiple cultural settings. . . They succeed in broadening the notion of pure business toward 'commerce' (including an indispensable sociocultural dimension); in linking responsibility to personal agency and freedom; and in seriously discussing the sociocultural context, especially relevant to international business. . . . this is an important book." - Choice
"This is not a moralist book about business ethics. This book is about how to analyze and understand the social aspects of business that are contextually rich and have significant consequences in people's lives around the world. . . . This book is particularly recommendable to those managers who are seldom asked to stop and investigate how identifying and solving business problems are influenced by their ideological positions, local knowledge, cultural processes, and habits of heart. . . . The case studies illustrate how business is socio-historically conditioned, and how practitioners can understand cultural dimensions of business by using anthropological research methods. . . . studies of Apple Computer, the Body Shop, and Pharmco, for instance, examine not only the historical influence of the leaders' values, and the multiple meanings of managerial practice, but also the diverse voices of stakeholders, the polysemic processes of local knowledge-creation, and their dynamic relationship with larger historical and socio-political trends." - Tomoko Hamada, 14th Congress Executive Secretary and Scientific Program Chair, The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES); and Professor, College of William and Mary
". . . presents a challenging and important new statement of management ethics. . . . Their discussion of the need for transformational leadership in achieving the socially responsible firm is especially challenging, but a necessary part of the broader vision required to create business organizations that are not just economically successful, but also ethically and culturally justified." - Richard J. Boland, Jr., Editor-in-Chief Accounting, Management and Information Technologies