I’ve just been checking out this book, and it seems to offer some interesting insight into how social conscience relates to capitalism and the market. Corporations that don’t exercise social responsibility end up failing, the thesis goes, which would seem to be valuable support for the notion that capitalism works– that agents of corporate fraud can’t, ultimately, survive in a free market. I’ll let you know how the book turns out, but here is an interesting excerpt from the first chapter:

As evidenced by the number of ethical missteps in the news, today we pay the piper as we tally the sorry record of organizational wrongdoings, infractions, and white-collar crimes, all of which can be traced to a diminishing interest in standards, controls, integrity, and that nineteenth-century commodity known as good reputation. Yet as a society, we define ourselves by the values we choose to emphasize. Beginning in the 1980s, a frenzied quest for efficiency led to the endorsement of individualism over community. The resulting emphasis on short-term returns encouraged a speculative frenzy in the stock markets and merger mania on Wall Street, variously described as “the casino society” [2] and a “circus of ambition,” [3] attacked in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street, and satirized in Tom Wolfe’s popular book The Bonfire of the Vanities. [4] The reputation of the business community as a whole fell to an all-time low. On into the 1990s and today, companies like E. F. Hutton, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Salomon Brothers committed very public ethical wrongdoings, while others saw their reputations become severely tarnished. Once-giant organizations took a fall, never to recover to their previous grandeur. As suggested by Fombrun, [5] the corporate world has squandered much of its reputational capital and its ability to survive and thrive in the years to come.