A well-researched, absorbing, and balanced case for corporate-activist partnerships.
A legal scholar examines the growing phenomenon of corporate activism.
In this debut book, Lin—a law professor at Temple University and Academic Fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Law, Economics & Finance—suggests that “too often the stories of activists and capitalists are told as disparate, unrelated stories of distinct tribes.” With an expert’s grasp on current trends in corporate America, the author instead sees the “new reality of corporate social activism” and the “interplay between capitalists and activists” as an important 21st-century development. Nearly every major corporation, for instance, has formal “social responsibility programs,” and Fortune 500 companies have pumped billions of dollars into these campaigns since 2020 alone. The intertwining of grassroots and corporate activism can be seen in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida. At the same time, gun control activists, many of them students who survived the shooting, organized the “March for Our Lives” protest in Washington, D.C., and America’s largest banks cut their financial ties to gun manufacturers who made bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. Corporate influence on social issues comes as no surprise to Lin, who describes in an accessible and rigorous narrative how government policies in the 1970s and ’80s and Supreme Court cases like Citizens Unitedhave transformed companies into “private empires.” And though there is a “danger of corporate whitewashing” by using social justice campaigns to divert attention from “problematic business practices,” the author by and large sees the intersection of social consciousness and capitalism as a positive development that leads to “Better Activism” and “Better Business.” Thus, while recognizing corporate bad actors like former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, the engrossing book often gives entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt. Many moderates and neoliberals will share the eloquent volume’s optimistic sentiments as well as embrace its support of both free market capitalism and social justice reforms. But those outside the ideological mainstream may find this work a frustrating read—from those on the right like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who rail against “corporate communism” to those on the left whose plans for systemic reform include dismantling corporations.
A well-researched, absorbing, and balanced case for corporate-activist partnerships.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-52-309199-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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