Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World - Softcover

Edwards, Michael

 
9781605093772: Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1605093777 ISBN 13: 9781605093772
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A former Ford Foundation director takes a critical look at the role of for-profit companies in philanthropy—and exposes the troubling risks and downsides.
 
A new movement is afoot that promises to save the world by bringing the magic of the market to philanthropy. Nonprofits should be run like businesses, its adherents say, and businesses can find new sources of revenue by marketing goods and services that benefit society. What could be wrong with that? 

Plenty, argues Michael Edwards. In this hard-hitting, controversial expose he marshals a wealth of evidence to show just how far short the promise of so-called philanthrocapitalism has fallen, and why the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. Some business practices can be beneficial to nonprofits, and it’s definitely a good thing that the for-profit sector is developing a social conscience. Edwards carefully specifies when businesses and business thinking can help. But to really get at the root causes of the systemic problems most nonprofits wrestle with—hunger, poverty, disease, violence—a completely different way of operating is required.
 
Social transformation demands cooperation rather than competition, collective action more than individual effort, and patient, long-term support for solutions over short-term results. Philanthrocapitalism concentrates power in the hands of a few major players, mirroring the very inequities civil organizations should be trying to ameliorate. With a vested interest in the status quo, it shies away from fundamental change. At most all it can promise is valuable but limited advances: small change. Ultimately, Edwards declares that the use of business thinking can and does corrupt civil society. It’s time to differentiate the two—and re-assert the independence of global citizen action.
 
“Anyone who wants the truth of philanthropy in America should read this book.” —Robert B. Reich

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Edwards is a writer and activist affiliated with the think tank Demos in New York, the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester University in the UK. Previously, he was director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Program and worked for the World Bank, Oxfam, and Save the Children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Irrational Exuberance

The Rise of “Philanthrocapitalism”

It is six o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and the Swan Lake Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary is cleaning up after its latest community rummage sale. Not much money changed hands today, but plenty of warm clothes did, much needed with the onset of winter in this upstate New York town. Prices varied according to people’s ability to pay, and those who couldn’t pay at all — like the mother who brought all her money in dimes, quarters, and pennies inside a plastic bag — were simply given what they needed, and driven home to boot. “Imagine what this would have cost me at Walmart,” she told her driver.

In some ways, there is nothing special about this story, which is repeated a million times a day in civil society groups that act as centers of solidarity and sharing. In another sense, it is profoundly important, because it represents a way of living in the world that is rooted in equality, love, and justice, a radical departure from the values of competition and commerce that increasingly rule our world. It is not that the members of the Ladies Auxiliary are free from concerns about money and what things cost — like everyone else, they have to make a living and raise funds to support their work, and they keep meticulous accounts. But when it comes to their responsibilities as citizens, they play by a different set of rules, which are grounded in rights that are universal, not restricted by access according to one’s income; they recognize the intrinsic value of relationships that can’t be traded off against production costs or profit; and they live out philanthropy’s original meaning as “love of humankind.” Over many generations, community groups and social movements have protected these principles in their work to attack discrimination and injustice, alleviate poverty, and protect the natural world.

Across the universe, meanwhile, a very different form of philanthropy is taking shape. It has been nicknamed philan-throcapitalism by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green1, and its followers believe that business thinking and market methods will save the world — and make some of us a fortune along the way. Bobby Shriver, Bono’s partner in the Red brand of products, hopes that sales will help “buy a house in the Hamptons” while simultaneously swelling the coffers of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.2 Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, thinks that “the profit motive could be the best tool for solving the world’s problems, more effective than any government”3 — until government has to bail you out, of course, as it did for large swaths of American finance and industry in the aftermath of the financial crash in September 2008.

“If you put a gun to my head and asked which one has done more good for the world, the Ford Foundation or Exxon,” says Charles Munger, vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway, “I’d have no hesitation in saying Exxon,”4 though I can’t think of any oil spills that my old employers have dumped into the Pacific. “This,” says Jeff Skoll, who co-created eBay, “is our time.”5 There are philanthrocapitalists outside the United States, too, like Carlos Slim, the owner of most of the Mexican economy; Nandan Nilekani, of Infosys in India; and Shi Zhengrong, of Suntech Power in China, who are all “hyper-agents,” according to Bishop and Green, smashing through the barriers that have obstructed previous efforts to solve global problems. In this book, I won’t be focusing on non-U.S. examples like these because so little rigorous information is available on their efforts, but it is clear that the influence of philanthrocapitalism is spreading from the United States to other parts of the world, just as in earlier generations of philanthropy. The four richest people in the world are philanthrocapitalists — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, and Larry Ellison, with combined assets of $135 billion, more than the gross domestic product of some of the world’s most populous countries, including Nigeria and Bangladesh.6Not all philanthrocapitalists are rich (we’ll meet some of them in chapter 2), and not all rich philanthropists subscribe to these methods and approaches, but the basic message of this movement is pretty clear: Traditional ways of solving social problems do not work, so business thinking and market forces should be added to the mix.

Actually, these traditional ways, like the Ladies Auxiliary and social movements dedicated to human rights, have often worked, though imperfectly, and if we gave them more support and recognition, they could work even better — but that’s not what the philanthrocapitalists want to hear. Instead, “the real scandal,” says Harvard’s Michael Porter, “is how much money is pissed away on activities that have no impact. Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy.”7 “Charities have failed for decades to deliver … do we want to continue with the status quo or apply some fresh, inherently efficient [my italics] and potentially very effective thinking to find new solutions?”8 This statement comes from Kurt Hoffman, director of the Shell Foundation, in a letter to the Guardian in London, though I could have picked from any number of statements that are constantly repeated as though they represent a simple and straightforward truth. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time someone has lectured me on the virtues of business thinking for foundations and nonprofits, I’d be a philanthropist myself.

This is a very odd way to talk about groups that have cared for the casualties of every crisis and recession for a hundred years or more, kept communities together in the good times and the bad, brought democracy alive in places very large and very small, protected the environment from continuous corporate degradation, pushed successfully for the advancement of civil and women’s rights, and underpinned every successful social reform since slavery was abolished. As far as I can tell, the people who make such statements have never worked in groups like these, nor have they studied the achievements and history of civil society organizations, nor have they experienced the difficulties of tackling power and inequality on a shoestring and in the face of constant opposition. On these grounds, maybe community organizers should go work for Lehman Brothers.

Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea: It might have saved us from the colossal mismanagement and risk taking by banks and hedge funds that led to the financial crisis — companies that were so successful and well managed that, like Lehman Brothers and its foundation, they collapsed overnight, leaving hundreds of nonprofits to face financial ruin — or it might have spared us Bernard Madoff with his massive Ponzi scheme, who defrauded Jewish charities of huge amounts of money and caused whole philanthropies like the JEHT Foundation to vanish without a trace.9 “In investment banking, it is taken for granted that decisions about how to use capital are based on rigorous research into performance,” say Bishop and Green in their love poem to philanthrocapitalism; or as we now know, such decisions could be based on raw speculation at everyone else’s expense. What is “inherently efficient” about business thinking and the market? That’s just ideology — pure, simple, and absolutely incorrect.

Not all philanthrocapitalists talk or feel this way, but the mix of arrogance and ignorance revealed in these quotations sure takes some explaining. What lies behind the rise of this phenomenon? The...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605093777
ISBN 13 
9781605093772
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
eucomply
hello@eucompliancepartner.com

Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781459626423: Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1459626427 ISBN 13:  9781459626423
Verlag: ReadHowYouWant, 2012
Softcover