The rationale of this volume is explained in the first sentence of the introduction: “The prevailing aspiration of business is performance, while that of society is progress” (1). The tension between these two values motivated the interdisciplinary discussions on which this book is based. Our capitalist economic system, which is based on the competitive performance of businesses, seem to have become decoupled from notions of social progress, and aggravates ills such inequality, declining social trust, and environmental degradation. One aim of the book is to provide “some sorely missing moral and conceptual foundations” (2) for how to bring “performance” back in line with “progress.”

The volume is ambitious, and how one evaluates it crucially depends on what kind of book one takes it to be. Formally, it is an edited volume that brings together 26 essays by leading experts from philosophy, economics, and management studies as well as practitioners; the list of authors reads like a who’s who of the debate about capitalism and economic justice. Their contributions are organized around five broad themes: “problem,” “progress,” “balancing and trade-offs,” “choices and preferences,” and “power and trust.”

It is also worth noting what the book is not: it is not a coherent whole in the sense of a joint research program or a unified normative framework. Nor is it a presentation of cutting-edge research, at least not in all chapters. Many authors present summaries of their earlier research, or pick out some aspects that they take one step further. Those who expect the volume to be either of these things might be disappointed, but they should not jump to the conclusion that it has no merits, and they would miss the opportunity for a rich and inspiring read that is likely to offer food for thought even for readers well familiar with the volume’s themes.

One way of reading the volume is to see it as the documentation of a conversation between scholars from different disciplines on the current state of capitalism and the best ways forward. As is explained in the introduction, the book is based on a meeting of the authors in which they presented their papers and discussed the themes of the volume. The write-ups by Michael Fuerstein included at the end of each part provide some glimpses of what must have been extremely stimulating debates. These summaries are an unusual genre, but one that might deserve wider usage. And one can take away from this book what one also takes away from a good academic conference: a plethora of insights, which, together, help to develop and refine one’s own views and positions.

Yet another way of approaching this book is to see it as a source for teaching, especially at business schools. This is one of the avowed intentions of the editor (5-7), and as such, the volume could indeed be extremely valuable. Some important philosophical and sociological arguments, for example about the nature of collective agency or the difference between instrumental and Kantian reasoning, are presented in an accessible manner. Those who teach at business schools—and indeed elsewhere—receive a smorgasbord of texts which are suitable for courses such as “Economy and Society,” “Business Ethics,” or “Economic Justice.” As a philosopher, I hope that the book will be a success and bring philosophical, political, and sociological reasoning to business schools, and maybe thereby contribute to a more intense dialogue between scholars and students from different disciplines.

In what follows, I provide an overview of the chapters, selectively commenting on the arguments and perspectives brought forward in them.

Mahid H. Jafar starts by asking “What’s Wrong with Capitalism?,” diagnosing the lack of self-correcting mechanisms for several problematic trends, including growing inequality. James G. March critically reflects on decision theory, its limited perspective, and the dangers of it becoming self-fulfilling: “decision theory tends to erode values by focusing explicitly on their trade-offs and reducing the angst associated with violating them” (33). Kenneth J. Arrow describes the economy as a complex adaptive system, pointing out its strengths in dealing with certain kinds of knowledge, but also its limitations, e.g. when it comes to asymmetrical information, externalities, or the regulation of business cycles. David Schmidtz discusses “What Really Should Not Be For Sale” in an attempt to work towards an “anatomy of corruption” (49). His basic argument is that more concentrated power is dangerous because it becomes more prone to corrupt those who hold it. While his discussion of how power can corrupt one’s self-awareness is illuminating, the conclusion that power is least corruptible when it is most dispersed (63) may hold ceteris paribus, but ceteris does not have to be paribus, because concentrated power can also be controlled in other ways, for example by legal accountability, a public service ethos, or media scrutiny. John W. Meyer discusses how the increasing interconnectedness of today’s world is managed by various actors and organizations, e.g., NGOs, who are able not only to solve problems, but also to create new ones. His conclusion that “[e]verybody can gain something from the development of new problems” (89), however, could be misunderstood in a cynical way. A world in which NGOs raise awareness of, say, human rights violations, is certainly a better world than one in which human rights violations are swept under the carpet.

Kwame Anthony Appiah opens Part II, on “Progress,” by discussing some of the failures of capitalism with regard to social progress, especially concerning the failure to satisfy basic needs and the creation of inequality; he concludes his chapter by underlining the importance of honor and shame as “modes of social regulation” (109). Philip Kitcher dissects the notion of progress, distinguishing between scientific and ethical progress, and arguing against a teleological and for a pragmatic notion of progress. Drawing on Mill and Dewey, he shows how economic approaches to progress overlook questions about education, meaningful work, and community (130–132). James P. Walsh presents a personal meditation on what progress might mean, drawing on his experience as marathon runner and on a bibliometric analysis of The New York Times between 1980 and 2008 that shows that the correlation between “progress” and “hope” is 0.49. Amartya Sen defends a concept of human nature that includes not only needs, but also values, which he takes to be crucial for understanding what progress is. His discussion draws on early Indian legal theorists’ distinction between niti and nyaya as a narrower and a more comprehensive notion of realized justice (153–154) and on numerous other thinkers from the history of economic and political thought. Jack Ma concludes this part with brief reflections on what individual and social progress meant for the founding and developing on Alibaba in China.

Part III starts with a paper by Elizabeth Anderson on “The Business Enterprise as an Ethical Agent,” in which she emphasizes the importance of reciprocity and trust in the relations between businesses and their various stakeholders. They provide internal ethical standards for the activity of businesses that operate for profit—profit, however, should arise “as the by-product of the mission,” not as an end in itself (192)—but nonetheless need ethical guidance. Jay B. Barney’s chapter “Shareholders, Stakeholders, and Strategic Factor Markets,” which I would count among the most interesting of the volume, presents an original argument about the inconsistency of shareholder value theory, which presents shareholders as the only stakeholders with a residual claim. Drawing on strategic factor market theory, Barney argues that if all relations between a firm and its stakeholders except those with its shareholders were structured as fully competitive markets, the firm could not make a profit, because it would have to pay a competitive price for each of these factors. If this is not the case, for example, because labor markets are not perfectly competitive, then there is no reason to think that shareholders are the only residual claimants. Therefore, Barney defends stakeholder against shareholder theory; in order to generate profits at all, managers need to “have a deep understanding of their firm’s relationship to all of its stakeholders” (214, emphasis added). This chapter is followed by one by Mathias Risse on the ramifications of the idea that the Earth is collectively owned by humanity, with a focus on questions of intergenerational justice applied to climate change. David H. Autor tackles another question about the future of capitalism, that of “automation anxiety,” i.e., the problem that robots might lower the price paid for human labor. He provides a threefold explanation of why wages for non-colleges workers have fallen sharply in the US, citing globalization, the decline of unions, and the rise of computer-intense machinery. Jim Hagemann Snabe offers short but forceful thoughts on whether we could avoid the trade-off between environmental values and employment by focusing on technologies that allow optimizing scarce resources instead of eliminating labor. Samuel J. Palmisado concludes this part by describing his experiences of the turnaround of IBM. One memorable line from his chapter is that businesses “cannot cost-cut their way to competitiveness” (269), but need to find ways of creating genuine value for society.

Part IV, on “Choices and Preferences,” opens with another chapter by a practitioner, Ramón Mendiola, who describes his notion of “holistic capitalism” and the role of individuals in different roles as investors, business leaders, or consumers, as well as the role of government. Harrison Hong and Inessa Liskovich, in the only chapter that is mostly empirical, draw on quasi-experiments to determine what role agency motives play in “corporate goodness”; whether such a notion can be measured at all is also discussed in the chapter. Robert H. Frank presents his notion of “positional externalities,” i.e., externalities arising from the fact that people enter into rat races for relative positions. He uses this notion to throw light on issues such as hours regulation, the regulation of financial markets, mandatory savings, and progressive taxation, arguing for a progressive consumption tax as the best tool for fighting positional externalities. Valerie Tiberius’s presents yet another challenge to standard economic theory by presenting an account of human well-being that focuses on value fulfillment instead of preference satisfaction, an approach that she understands as a first step “in order to find a path away from “consumerism” (353). Susan Neiman’s concluding chapter “Ideas of Reason” discusses a somewhat related theme, namely Kantian reasoning versus the reasoning of homo oeconomicus.

Part V shifts the focus to the role of corporations, starting with a chapter by Philip Pettit that rejects two fallacies, namely that corporate bodies are no agents at all or that they should have the same rights as individual persons. Gerald F. Davis describes the changing phenomenon of corporate power: while it had long been based on the concentration of resources and corporate hierarchies, in today’s capitalism is has become more diffuse and less stable, with “de-verticalized” modes of production and internet businesses that operate with tiny staff numbers compared to the revenues they generate. The phenomenon of “a small number of very large prizewinners” (409) contributes to growing inequality because there is less intra-firm redistribution. Michael Fuerstein discusses how capitalism poses a threat to “democratic contestation” because markets are anonymous processes in which agency is distributed and no one is accountable for negative effects; to improve the situation, he suggests creating more deliberative forums in which businesses and their stakeholders can interact. Julie Battilana introduces the theme of social enterprises and suggests a roadmap for future research on “hybrid organizing” (443–454). The last chapter, by Bertrand Collomb, contrasts a compliance culture with a culture of trust, and asks how “institutional trust” could be restored based on ethics. He emphasizes the role of business schools in bringing about change, thus drawing the line back to the editor’s intentions outlined in the introduction.