Corporation Nation
How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives -- and What We Can Do About It
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Foreword by Ralph Nader. In Corporation Nation Derber addresses the unchecked power of today's corporations to shape the way we work, earn, buy, sell, and think—the very way we live. Huge, far-reaching mergers are now commonplace, downsizing is rampant, and our lines of communication, news and entertainment media, jobs, and savings are increasingly controlled by a handful of global—and unaccountable—conglomerates. We are, in effect, losing our financial and emotional security, depending more than ever on the whim of these corporations. But it doesn't have to be this way, as this book makes clear. Just as the original Populist movement of the nineteenth century helped dethrone the robber barons, Derber contends that a new, positive populism can help the U.S. workforce regain its self-control.
Drawing on core sociological concepts and demonstrating the power of the sociological imagination, he calls for revisions in our corporate system, changes designed to keep corporations healthy while also making them answerable to the people. From rewriting corporate charters to altering consumer habits, Derber offers new aims for businesses and empowering strategies by which we all can make a difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
We must take up a "positive populism" to defend society against corporations, while at the same time protecting the health of business, argues Boston College sociologist Derber (The Wilding of America). Derber begins with a useful, somewhat polemical survey of growing corporate power, synthesizing and critiquing thinkers such as William Greider and John Kenneth Galbraith and occasionally being unable to resist calling the replacement of workers with contractors "job genocide." He reminds us that seemingly private corporations are actually quite dependent, relying on government for subsidies, infrastructure and trade law, and suggests that strengthened unions can help narrow national income gaps. He warns, however, that the current trend toward corporate "social responsibility" distracts from the need for government policies and proposes a move toward the German-style stakeholder corporation in which workers and community representatives have a voice in governance; he calls for all corporations over $1 billion to be "public corporations," required to "serve clear public needs." Change, Derber suggests, might be effected by the labor movement in collaboration with civic groups, multiculturalists and environmentalists. Derber is genuinely engaged; generally even-handed, this is a necessary critique.
