Big business ain’t what it used to be, if it ever was. “The achievement of the Clinton and the DLC generation was, in fact, to think about first principles, to think about the relationships between state and civil society, to think about the ability of the market to achieve traditional, liberal ends,” The New Republic’s Peter Beinert said at Harvard last year.
And they are succeeding. “Success in the business sector today requires engagement with governments, academic institutions, and others,” Edward E. Potter, an executive with Coca-Cola wrote in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “This engagement provides the fabric for progress in labor rights, environmental stewardship, and community development.”
“The United Nations’ International labor Organization has always appreciated the important interplay among sectors.” Potter is director of Global Labor Relations and Workplace Accountability at the company’s Atlanta headquarters.
As Don Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s parent group, discovered, this ethos prevails at shareholder meetings. He went to the Philadelphia conclave of General Electric as part of a delegation with the Free Enterprise Action Fund, which was formed to depoliticize investment. But this form of activist investment they are up against can take form before executives get their first washroom keys.
“A pair of bald eagles glide in lazy circles overhead as a group of M. B. A. students haul their duffel bags along a wooded path toward one of the nation’s most unusual business schools,” Katherine S. Mangan writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For one weekend a month, these students leave their jobs as computer engineers, clean-water advocates, restaurateurs, and government administrators to learn how to build profitable, socially responsible businesses.”
“The trek starts early in the morning, from as far away as New York and Colorado, and winds up with a 30-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle to a retreat on 255 acres of forest and wetlands.”
So far, most business schools stay away from this full-scale Kumbaya treatment. At that, though, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute described above is having a far-reaching impact.
“Graduates of the institute have parlayed their skills into new jobs,” Mangan reports. “Alumni include REI’s first program manager for corporate social responsibility, a community food-bank administrator who brings organic food from farms to cafeterias, and an architect working on environmental-remediation projects in American Indian communities.”
“As the weekend draws to a close, students gather for the ‘closing circle’ where, led by the school’s dean, Jill Bamburg, they sing ‘Bread and Roses’—a song popular in labor and folk circles.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
