Just Economics? Business Perspectives on Corporate Accountability and Democratizing the Economy

Overview & Synopsis

This edited volume offers a fresh and critical perspective on how different business entities – from multinational corporations, to cooperatives, social enterprises, community wealth-building projects, activist hedge funds and Indigenous companies – envisage corporate accountability for human and ecological rights and how this connects to ideas and processes of democratizing the economy. Taking an actor-focused approach and collecting interdisciplinary case studies of different industries across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and North America since 1945, the book examines a wide range of business reactions to social and judicial critiques, as well as their attempts to weaken international and national accountability processes or foster progressive frameworks of social equality, and human and environmental rights. The volume challenges the idea of neoliberal hegemony as a stable condition and emphasizes the diversity and fragmentation of business responses to corporate accountability and the way they intersect with wider struggles for economic justice and democracy, nature’s rights, and ecological regeneration. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in corporate accountability, human rights, social and environmental justice, democracy, and more broadly law, sociology, and political science.