Every October, National Football League (NFL) stadiums across the country are awash in pink. The cheerleaders’ little outfits and pompoms, the penalty flags, the players’ cleats, gloves, and wristbands, quarterback towels, referee whistles and caps, sometimes even portions of the field itself—all pink. It is the NFL’s annual campaign to “help fight breast cancer.” The league even donates a portion of proceeds from sales in the NFL Shop to the American Cancer Society’s programs to increase awareness, education, and screenings for women over 40.
Since the program began in 2009, the league has raised more than $8 million by selling pink NFL merchandise and auctioning off pink apparel worn in the game.1 According to Nielsen research, an NFL commercial promoting the importance of annual breast cancer screenings was the most memorable ad run during the games among the core 18- to 34-year-old audience.2 The NFL estimates that every October its campaign brings the message of early detection to more than 150 million viewers, including more than 58 million women age 18 and older.3
Many would call this an exercise in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Some are not so sure.
Critics point out that the league’s annual donation to the American Cancer Society amounts to less than 0.01 percent of annual revenue in excess of $13 billon. Others suggest the very idea of annual mammography screenings is expensive and ineffective, pointing to research showing it has no impact on survival rates of women with the disease.4 And political cartoonist Jeff Darcy suggested the NFL choose the wrong color: “All the pink [on] Sunday couldn’t hide the fact that the NFL is black and blue over its stunning lack of domestic violence awareness.”5
As it happens, October is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month and, in 2014, the league had to deal with criticism it was not policing its own players’ behavior off the field. For example, the League suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for two games when he knocked his then fiancée unconscious in an Atlantic City hotel elevator. But when a video emerged showing Rice actually throwing the punch and then dragging her out of the elevator, that penalty seemed woefully insignificant and the League, totally out of touch.
In response to a rising wave of criticism, the League suspended Rice indefinitely,6 pledged to develop more effective domestic abuse programs for its players, promised to donate “multiple millions” to victim support groups, and ran a commercial to raise awareness of the issue during that year’s SuperBowl.7 Still, to many, the league’s notion of corporate responsibility seemed largely an exercise in window dressing.
Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman would have had an even harsher view. He tried to end all this misguided do-gooding in a New York Times Sunday magazine article way back in 1970, calling it “fundamentally subversive … in a free society.”8 And that gets us into a debate that has been raging since the creation of limited liability, joint-stock enterprises in 18569—what is the purpose of a business corporation? There are two principle schools of thought on the subject, each serving different masters—shareowners on the one hand and stakeholders on the other.
Shareowner Value
The shareowner value school of corporate purpose was perhaps most clearly enunciated by Milton Friedman in his 1970 article. In a free society, he claimed, business has “one and only one social responsibility—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” This sounds selfish, but Friedman believed the greatest good for society results from people pursing their own self-interest. In accord with Adam Smith’s (1759/1976, p. 184) proverbial “invisible hand,” while business people focus on making money, they are simultaneously creating jobs, raising the general public’s standard of living, and helping to create a more stable, growing economy.
As far as Friedman is concerned,
in the free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.
Friedman suggests that corporate executives who spend their company’s resources for any other purpose than making money are stealing from its owners. And he does not leave much wiggle room in the apparent loophole of “ethical custom.” CSR and “the nonsense spoken in its name” may “be in the long-term interests of a corporation,” “make it easier to attract desirable employees or have other desirable effects,” and may even “generate good will,” he maintained. But it is still “hypocritical window-dressing” “approaching fraud” and “clearly harms the foundations of a free society.”
Friedman’s thesis was based on several closely related beliefs. First, that corporate share ownership is a form of private property that no one can use without permission and fair compensation. Second, that a corporation is “an artificial person” with “artificial responsibilities” limited to the purpose for which it was established, that is, to make money for its owners. And third, that it is government’s job to see to the public welfare. If voters cannot elect public officials who will tend to social problems such as controlling pollution or training the hardcore unemployed, they should not be allowed to pressure corporations to do it, which he characterized as “seeking to attain by undemocratic procedures what they cannot attain by democratic procedures.”
Capitalism
Capitalism, the economic system most closely associated with the shareowner value theory, seems to work. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to the World Bank, the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen by more than 50 percent since 1990.10 “The credit goes to the spread of capitalism,” the Journal declared. “Over the past few decades, developing countries have embraced economic-policy reforms that have cleared the way for private enterprise.” Indeed, the newspaper anointed capitalism as “the ultimate global anti-poverty program.” Adam Smith’s invisible hand seems to have been tending to the world’s poor.
The shareowner value theory also seems to have a solid legal foundation. At the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford envisioned a “horseless carriage” in every driveway, and he poured every cent he made into manufacturing them. Instead of paying higher dividends, he used the company’s profits to build better, cheaper cars and to pay higher wages. Some of his shareowners disagreed with this strategy, especially the two Dodge brothers who had dreams of their own and had already started a competing car company. When Ford refused to pay a higher dividend, the Dodge brothers hauled him into court.
In 1919, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with the Dodge brothers and ordered Ford to pay a special dividend.11 While the justices said they would not interfere with Ford’s judgment on things like pricing and building new plants, they made clear he was mistaken in his belief that his company could pursue any altruistic end he wanted:
There should be no confusion . . . . A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to … other purposes.
That decision became the go-to argument in defense of the shareowner value theory. It is widely cited as proof the law requires corporations to have a “profit maximizing purpose” (Clark, 1986, p. 6768) and “managers and directors have a legal duty to put shareholders’ interests above all others and [have] no legal authority to serve any other interests …” (Bakan, 2004, p. 36).
But while other courts have confirmed the priority of shareowner interests, none have declared it a company’s exclusive or sole purpose. In fact, Leo Strine, Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, which has the broadest influence on corporate law, offered what he called a “clear-eyed look” at the issue:
When the corporation is not engaging in a sale of control transaction, the directors have wide leeway to pursue the best interests of stockholders as they perceive them, and need not put any specific weight on maximizing current share value. As a means to the end of increasing stockholder welfare, directors may consider the interests of other constituencies (2015, March 20, p. 16).
Long Term vs. Short Term
In other words, a company’s directors may pass up a higher short-term profit if they believe it will best advance the interests of stockholders in the long run. Employee health insurance, for example, costs money in the short run, but in the long run healthy employees may have higher morale and be more productive. And the U.S. Supreme Court recently noted that “While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else.”12
Finally, when Friedman began his career, stock ownership was relatively concentrated. Today, it is widely dispersed and volatile. The average mutual fund turns over nearly its entire portfolio every 12 months. So shareholder value has really become a euphemism for this quarter’s profits. But Justice Strine (2015, March 20, p.4) drew a clear distinction between “the current stock price” and what he termed “shareowner welfare.” Company directors must focus on the latter, not the former. Still, the debate continues. And since Friedman’s 1970 manifesto, other business thinkers have offered alternative views.
Stakeholder Theory
Philosopher and management theorist R. Edward Freeman developed one of the most influential alternate theories in his 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Freeman maintains that, in addition to the people who invest in a company, businesses need to serve the interests of a broad array of other parties, including employees, customers, suppliers, and the communities in which they operate. Freeman called these people “stakeholders” and defined them as “groups and individuals that can affect, or are affected by, the accomplishment of organizational purpose” (p. 41). And he argued that in today’s globalized economy, a corporation’s long-run success depends on taking their interests into account.
To do this, Freeman suggested the theory of the firm must be reconceptualized “along essentially Kantian lines, meaning each stakeholder group has a right to be treated as an end in itself, and not as means to some other end,” and therefore must “participate in determining the future direction of the firm in which [it has] a stake” (Evan and Freeman, 2012, pp. 97, 105).
In a sense, Freeman believed the shareowner theory that businesses exist to create wealth was correct, but defined the recipients of that wealth too narrowly. “The very purpose of the firm is, in our view, to serve as a vehicle for coordinating stakeholder interests,” Evan and Freeman (2012, p. 103) wrote. “It is through the firm that each stakeholder group makes itself better off.” On Kantian grounds, corporations have an ethical duty to respect the rights of the people they deal with. On consequentialist grounds, they are responsible for the effects of their actions. And for those who claim that corporations are only obligated to follow the law, proponents of stakeholder theory would quote Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter who reputedly observed, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”
A Theory with Many Advocates
Perhaps, reflecting concern that shareowner theory had been used to justify short-term financial engineering with disastrous social consequences, many scholars and even some business people rushed to embrace the stakeholder theory. In the first decade after publication, it was the subject of more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles, each giving it a slightly different twist. Out of this thicket of theorizing, ethicist Thomas Donaldson and business professor Lee Preston (1995) developed a thesis that has, in turn, been cited more than 1,000 times, serving as a firm foundation for our ethical inquiry. It starts with a two-part definition of stakeholders:
(a) Stakeholders are persons or groups with legitimate interests in procedural and/or substantive aspects of corporate activity. Stakeholders are identified by their interests in the corporation, whether the corporation has any corresponding functional interest in them.
(b) The interests of all stakeholders are of intrinsic value. That is, each group of stakeholders merits consideration for its own sake and not merely because of its ability to further the interests of some other group, such as the shareowners (pp. 65–81).
In ethical circles, these are known as “normative” statements. That is, they do not merely describe things as they are, but as they ought to be. In Davidson and Preston’s view, stakeholders are ethically entitled to certain rights. As it happens, it is also descriptive because surveys show that, despite the apparent popularity of the shareowner theory of the corporation, most managers say they consider more than shareowner interests in making decisions.
A 2006 survey of global business executives by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found only a minority wholeheartedly embraced Friedman’s view. Sixteen percent of respondents agreed that business should “focus solely on providing the highest possible returns to investors while obeying all laws and regulations.” But 84 percent said the role of large corporations should be to “generate high returns to investors but balance [that] with contributions to the broader public good.”13
“Managers may not make explicit reference to ‘stakeholder theory’,” Donaldson and Preston (1995. p.75) admit, “but the vast majority of them apparently adhere in practice to one of (its) central tenets, namely, that their role is to satisfy a wider set of stakeholders, not simply the shareowners.”
Popularity aside, Donaldson and Preston justify the stakeholder theory using the very principle of property rights that underlay Friedman’s arguments in favor of his shareowner theory. They point out that property rights have never been considered absolute and therefore do not “support the claim that the responsibility of managers is to act solely as agents for the shareowners” (p. 84). Legal scholars agree that what we call “property” is actually a bundle of many rights, some of which may be limited. In fact, Donaldson and Preston quote conservative economist Svetozar Pejovich (1990, pp. 27–28), who wrote that, “Property rights are relations between individuals,” “not an unrestricted right,” and thus “it is wrong to separate human rights from property rights.”
Of course, that leaves open the question of which “individuals” have a valid stake or claim in the “property” represented by a corporation. Donaldson and Preston (1995, pp. 85–86) maintain that, as a matter of justice, stakeholders include all those who experience actual or potential harms and benefits as a result of the firm’s actions or inactions. In practice, they write, “the appraisal of the legitimacy of such expectations is an important function of management, often in concert with other already recognized stakeholders.”
If anything, Donaldson and Preston accuse earlier proponents of the stakeholder theory of harboring an overly expansive view of stakeholders as “anything influencing or influenced by the firm” (p. 86). Such a definition swept competitors, as well as the media, into the ranks of stakeholders. It even allowed some to suggest that “the natural environment” is a stakeholder. But while both the media and competitors might affect the firm, neither could reasonably expect to benefit from the firm’s success, nor do they bear the risks of its failure except in the broadest sense. And while a healthy environment is obviously important to a firm’s success, it is not a human being. And denying it the ethical status of “stakeholder” in no way lessens a company’s obligation to treat it with care as a “public good.” Nor does denying “stakeholder” status to the likes of the media, social activists, and competitors mean companies can safely ignore them. On the contrary, as intermediaries who can influence genuine stakeholders, corporations will want to manage relationships with them carefully, but without any sense of ethical obligation beyond those owed other human beings.
However, we believe all those parties who genuinely contributed to the firm’s success or bore the risks of its failures, and whose support the company voluntarily accepted, have a moral interest in its affairs. Corporations have an ethical obligation—as a matter of fairness—to recognize and respond to those interests, over and above the respect and care due stakeholders as human beings and in addition to any narrow contractual obligations they may have.
The principal criticism of stakeholder theory is that it divides management’s attention, forcing a business’s leadership to balance the interests of multiple, often competing, constituencies. As Freeman himself once observed: “Owners want higher financial returns, while customers want more money spent on research and development. Employees want higher wages and better benefits, while the local community wants better parks and day-care facilities” (2001, p. 44). But rather than seeing this as a distraction from a company’s primary task of making money, Freeman considered it the essence of corporate management.
“Stakeholder theory is the idea that each one of these groups is important to the success of a business, and figuring out where their interests go in the same direction is what the managerial task and the entrepreneurial task is all about,” he wrote. “Stakeholder theory says if you just focus on financiers, you miss what makes capitalism tick … that shareholders and financiers, customers, suppliers, employees, communities can together create something that no one of them can create alone” (Freeman, 2009, October 1).
Freeman went so far as to claim his theories and Friedman’s may seem opposed, but really are not. He wrote,
I actually think if Milton Friedman were alive today …, he would be a stakeholder theorist. He would understand that the only way to create value for shareholders in today’s world is to pay attention to customers, suppliers, employees, communities and shareholders at the same time. What Friedman was against was the idea of social responsibility that does not have anything to do with business. I’m against that too (2009, October 1).
Kantian and Consequentialist Roots
Whether Freeman or Friedman, both or neither, is right about the purpose and responsibilities of the corporation is a question that each of us needs to answer for ourselves. Senior public relations counselors especially need to understand their client’s views on the subject because it will inform their counsel and work. In extreme cases of fundamental disagreement, it could even prompt a parting of the ways. Because what is actually at stake here is an ethical principle with both Kantian and consequentialist roots—a company’s ethical obligation to respect the autonomy of the human beings it deals with, to avoid causing them harm and, whenever possible, to do good.
More companies than the average person might suspect are exercising that ethical principle. For example, some of the United State’s largest food and beverage companies have pledged to remove billions of calories from their products to help combat the nation’s obesity epidemic. Brands from Bumble Bee, Campbell, and Coke to Kellogg’s, Kraft, and Pepsi are re-engineering products, reducing portion size, and shifting advertising to lower calorie offerings to help reduce obesity.14 And a growing number of firms realize their ethical obligations do not stop at the edge of their parking lots. Companies from Apple to Xerox have taken steps to ensure their suppliers conform to a global code of conduct on labor, health, safety and environmental activity. To be sure, at least some of these companies are motivated by enlightened self-interest. Consumers increasingly favor healthier food and expect companies to act responsibly. In fact, the term of art for such initiatives is “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) to emphasize a company’s impacts on society in general.
Corporate Social Responsibility
CSR need not be in conflict with a company’s obligation to its shareowners to operate at a profit. In fact, legendary management consultant Peter Drucker (1993, pp. 343–344) referred to this as “Bounded Goodness.” A company’s “specific mission is also society’s first need and interest,” he wrote. And it has a responsibility to make a profit on that mission. “The first ‘social responsibility’ of business is to make enough profit to cover the costs of the future,” Drucker (1984, p. 62) wrote. “Decaying businesses in a decaying economy are unlikely to be good neighbors, good employers or ‘socially responsible’ in any way.”
But Drucker was clear that business is accountable for more than its economic performance. It is also accountable for minimizing any negative impacts it might have on society. And he urged companies to take action on social problems, subject to the limits of their competence and authority. “To take on tasks for which one lacks competence is irresponsible,” he wrote, “It is also cruel. It raises expectations which will then be disappointed” (1993, pp. 343–344). And, of course, no business should seek to put itself in the place of government or try to impose its values on a community.
In the decades since Drucker set “the bounds of goodness,” many executives have concluded that CSR is not something a company does in addition to its real business; it is the way it does business. A 2010 McKinsey global survey shows that 76 percent of executives believe CSR contributes positively to long-term shareholder value.15 If that is not a practical enough justification, consider business strategist Michael Porter’s perspective that CSR should be a high priority for business leaders because governments, activists, and the media “have become adept at holding companies to account for the social consequences of their activities” (Porter and Kramer, 2006, December, p. 1).
Shared Value
But perhaps even more important than those coldly pragmatic reasons, Porter sees another more fundamental rationale—CSR “can be a source of opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage.” But first companies need to look at CSR as more than a cost, a constraint, or a nice thing to do.
Business professors Mark Schwartz and Archie Carroll (2003) studied the different motives that prompt companies to engage in CSR programs and came up with a theory of three over-lapping domains. Basically, they concluded companies were motivated by economic considerations (to be profitable), legal (to obey the law), or ethical (to sustain their license to operate by responding to society’s expectations). Like Schwartz and Carroll, Porter believes the ideal CSR program operates at the intersection of all three domains—economic, legal, and ethical. “The essential test that should guide CSR,” he maintains, “is not whether a cause is worthy but whether it represents an opportunity to create shared value—that is, a meaningful benefit for society that is also valuable for the business” (Porter and Kramer, 2006, December, pp. 7–8).
In later papers, Porter elaborated on this notion of “shared value,” suggesting that in today’s economies, “societal needs, not just conventional economic needs, define markets” and that “social harms or weaknesses frequently create internal costs for firms—such as wasted energy or raw materials, costly accidents, and the need for remedial training to compensate for inadequacies in education” (Porter and Kramer, 2011, January, pp. 62–77). He points to companies like General Electric, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, and Walmart, which have “have already embarked on important efforts to create shared value by reconceiving the intersection between society and corporate performance”.
In fact, he suggests the key is to focus on the interdependence of corporations and society rather than on the tensions between them. The latter approach, he suggests, has proven impotent. Companies that have built a pool of “good will” to draw on when they get into trouble have discovered it evaporates when the least heat is applied. “A firm that views CSR as a way to placate pressure groups,” he writes, “often finds that its approach devolves into a series of short-term defensive reactions … with minimal value to society and no strategic benefit to the business” (Porter and Kramer, 2006, December, p. 4).
Strategic CSR
A strategic—and we submit ethical—approach to CSR takes an inside-out/outside-in approach, first examining how a company impinges on society in the normal course of business (inside-out) and then considering how society impacts the underlying drivers of a company’s competitiveness wherever it operates (outside-in). This will produce different results for different companies. For example, the social consequences of operating a factory are different in China than in Europe. What might be nice-to-do for one company might be of strategic importance for another. For example, supporting a dance company might be of little strategic value to a local utility, but important to a credit card company that depends on tourism and entertainment.
In Porter’s view, CSR operates at three levels:
1. exercising good citizenship that meets community expectations,
2. mitigating harm from a firm’s activities, and
3. “mounting a small number of initiatives whose social and business benefits are large and distinctive” (pp. 9–10).
Creating economic value and social value simultaneously is not impossible. For example, working in partnership with nongovernmental organizations, Pepsico’s Sustainable Farm Initiative teaches local farmers from China to Mexico new agricultural techniques. The farmers improve their productivity; Pepsico gets a more reliable source of supply and helps preserve the environment.16 In the high-tech world, Cisco has partnered with educational institutions around the world to establish “networking academies” to train young men and women in information technologies. So far the academies have graduated more than 5.5 million students in 170 countries, building the skilled workforce Cisco’s customers need while improving people’s lives.17 Southwire, a cable manufacturer in rural Georgia, partnered with the local school system to hire high school students at risk of dropping out. The company paid more than minimum wage, but to keep their jobs, the students had to stay in school. Graduation rates jumped 10 percent and Southwire’s earnings increased by $1.7 million.18
However, there have also been instances of social responsibility done out of so much self-interest that it sucks any sense of responsibility to society out of it. We are thinking of programs that spend orders of magnitude more on promoting a company’s good works than on the good works themselves. Or philanthropy directed less at serving a real social need than at extorting political support from an influential charity. Both AT&T19 and Comcast20 have been accused of making large donations to community groups and then twisting their arms to support mergers unrelated to their charitable mission.
Moral Purpose
Porter has no illusions about the moral purpose of business. “The most important thing a corporation can do for society,” he says, “is contribute to a prosperous economy.” But in the accomplishment of that purpose, they cannot “shirk the social and environmental consequences of their actions.” And in a small number of well-defined instances, every company can and should address social issues that intersect with its business. “When a well-run business applies its vast resources, expertise, and management talent to problems that it understands and which it has a stake,” he writes, “it can have a greater impact on social good than any other institution or philanthropic organization” (Porter and Kramer, 2006, December, p. 15). That is being responsible. It has also become so popular Fortune magazine has launched yet another list: the 50 companies it believes have “made significant progress in addressing major social problems as a part of their core business strategy.”21
Unfortunately, the literature is littered with stories of companies that said all the right things about one cause or another, but in the final analysis accomplished little. For example, after a decade of futilely trying to counter fears ignited by the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, many chemical companies realized they could more easily delay, modify, or even avoid significant government regulation if they at least appeared to be cooperating with the environmental movement rather than opposing it on every front. Some companies were sincere and partnered with environmental groups to dramatically improve their operations. Others decided they could take action on the edges of their business where the cost was low and the results easily measurable and highly promotable. Recycling, for example, was easy to explain internally and externally. It could potentially reduce costs. And it came with a handsome logo to splash on promotional material. Thus was born the practice of greenwashing, the spray tan of corporate responsibility. Today, the environmental consultancy of Underwriters Laboratories estimates 95 percent of eco-friendly claims are based on irrelevant, weak, or non-existent data.22
All of which leaves us with the question that started this chapter—what to make of the NFL’s “partnership” with the American Cancer Society? Is it an exercise of CSR or an attempt at “pink washing,” that is, associating itself with a popular cause to distract the public from its own failings?
Summary
Any discussion of corporate responsibility leads inevitably to the question Aristotle considered the foundation of any ethical practice: What is its fundamental purpose? By definition, the ethical practice of business must serve the purpose for which it was established.
So far, so good, but as we have seen, some people have diametrically opposite views of a business’s purpose. Adherents of the so-called “shareholder theory” of the corporation believe a business exists solely to create wealth for its owners. They acknowledge that businesses are obligated to follow rules of the road, such as laws and regulations. But they also maintain that they bear no responsibility for dealing with any “externalities,” such as pollution, that are not specifically mandated by those rules. Indeed, many of them believe using corporate resources to alleviate societal problems is essentially stealing from the shareowners. While using those resources to beat back further regulation serves their owners’ interests.
Meanwhile, followers of the “stakeholder theory” maintain that a business exists to create wealth (or value) for everyone who contributes to its success or bears the risks of its failures. They acknowledge that some of a corporation’s responsibilities to these stakeholders are covered by legal agreements and contracts. But they maintain businesses also have an ethical obligation to their stakeholders over and above what the law requires. Indeed, they suggest that maintaining a proper balance between all stakeholders’ interests is management’s prime responsibility.
Business thinkers from Peter Drucker to Michael Porter have tried to build bridges between these seemingly opposing views by suggesting that defining business’s purpose broadly may not only be in a company’s enlightened self-interest, but also could be the source of competitive advantage. They believe every company needs to address three sets of interest—economic (to be profitable), legal (to obey the law), and ethical (to respond to society’s expectations). Drucker suggests companies should be bound by the limits of their competencies in addressing social problems. Porter suggests undertaking such work should be strategic, focusing on a small number of issues that intersect with the business and where a company can create value shared by itself and society.
With all that, the debate about corporate purpose continues. And, as Aristotle suggested thousands of years ago, where you come out on the question will determine how you think about corporate responsibility and ethics. It will require a careful balancing of interests, obligations, and rights—all of which are the topic of our next chapter.
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1 See the NFL’s “A Crucial Catch” http://www.nfl.com/pink.
2 Poogi, J. (2014, November 4). NFL’s breast cancer ad most memorable commercial among millenials. Ad Age. http://adage.com/article/media/top-10-commercials-millennials-october/295711/. Accessed July 22, 2015.
3 According to the latest NFL news release on the program issued on October 1, 2012. See http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap1000000068474/article/nfl-supports-breast-cancer-awareness-month
4 Sinha, S. (20143, October 8). The NFL’s pink October does not raise money for cancer research. Vice Sports. https://sports.vice.com/article/the-nfls-pink-october-does-not-raise-money-for-cancer-research. Accessed July 22, 2015.
5 Darcy, J. (2014, October 7). Northeast Ohio Media Group Editorial Cartoonist. http://www.cleveland.com/darcy/index.ssf/2014/10/nfl_domestic_violence_awarenes.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.
6 Rice was also fired by the Ravens. He challenged both his firing and suspension. The Ravens settled his suit against them, paying him a reported $3.5 million for the time left on his contract. A mediator reversed his indefinite suspension, making him eligible to play for another team. As of this writing, no team has picked him up.
7 Leaders of the NFL’s Domestic Violence Response Pledge ‘Multiple Millions. (2014, October 2). Chronicle of Philanthropy. http://philanthropy.com/article/Leaders-of-the-NFL-s/149185/. Accessed July 22, 2015.
8 This and later quotes are from Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The New York Times Sunday Magazine. http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.
9 England’s Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 made it possible for private investors to organize themselves as a company with limited legal liability. An 1896 court decision in Salomon v. A Salomon & Co. Ltd. found that a business incorporated under that statute has a distinct legal personality, separate from that of its individual shareholders.
10 Irwin, D. (2014, November 3). The ultimate global anti-poverty program. Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/articles/douglas-irwin-the-ultimate-global-antipoverty-program-1414972491. Accessed July 22, 2015.
11 Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919) at 684. http://www.law.illinois.edu/aviram/Dodge.pdf. Accessed September 7, 2015.
12 Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services et. al. v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. et al. (June 30, 2014). U.S., Nos. 13–354. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=13-354#opinion1. Accessed July 22, 2015.
13 McKinsey & Company. (2011, October). How companies manage sustainability: McKinsey Global Survey results. McKinsey Quarterly. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/energy_resources_materials/the_business_of_sustainability_mckinsey_global_survey_results. Accessed July 22, 2015.
14 Begley, S. (2014, January 9). Food, beverage companies slash calories in obesity fight. Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/09/us-calories-idUSBREA0805F20140109. Accessed July 22, 2015.
15 McKinsey & Company (2010). How Companies Manage Sustainability: Mckinsey Global Survey Results. McKinsey Quarterly. See: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/.
16 See Pepsico’s website: http://www.pepsico.com/Purpose/Environmental-Sustainability/Agriculture. Accessed July 22, 2015.
17 See Cisco’s website: https://www.netacad.com/web/about-us/about-networking-academy;jsessionid=8EEA987D2A1CAD9F73E89A887F7CEE44.node2. Accessed July 22, 2015.
18 See Porter, E. (2015, September 9). Corporate Action on Social Problems Has Its Limits, The New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1KZPbH2 Accessed September. 9, 2015.
19 Krigman, E. (2011, June 10). AT&T gave cash to Merger Backers. Politico. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56660.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.
20 Lipton, E. (2015, April 5). Comcast recruits its beneficiaries to lobby for Time Warner deal. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/business/media/comcast-recruits-its-beneficiaries-to-lobby-for-time-warner-deal.html. Accessed July 22, 2015.
21 Murray, A. (2015, September. 1). Doing Well by Doing Good. Fortune, pp. 57–74. http://fortune.com/change-the-world/. Accessed September 10, 2015.
22 TerraChoice (2010). “The Sins of Greenwashing,” http://sinsofgreenwashing.com/index35c6.pdf Accessed Oct. 15, 2015.