On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins speaks with Amit Ron and Abraham Singer, co-authors of Everyone’s Business:What Companies Owe Society (The University of Chicago Press, 2024). Together, Ron and Singer argue that businesses should move beyond profit and stakeholder models to actively protect democratic practices such as inclusion, reflexivity, and public oversight. They reject corporate claims to “civil disobedience” as prone to self-interest and warn against lobbying practices that create only the appearance of public participation. Drawing on the idea of institutional pluralism, they emphasize that democracy’s role is to continually assess and revise the work of different institutions to ensure they serve the public interest.

Dr. Amit Ron is an Associate Professor in School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, focusing on the history of political economy and democratic theory.

Dr. Abraham Singer is an Associate Professor of Management at Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, specializing in business ethics and political theory.

Read more work from Kristen Collins.

Show Notes:

• Abe and Amit's book, Everyone’s Business: What Companies Owe Society (The University of Chicago Press, 2024)
• Virtual Sentiments, S3E1 "Kris Rose on Deliberative Democracy and Meta's Community Forums"
• Virtual Sentiments, S3E5 "Alice Siu on Deliberative Polling and the Future of Democratic Dialogue"
• Virtual Sentiments, S1E4 "Jennifer Forestal on Designing Democratic Digital Spaces"
• Kevin Elliot’s Democracy for Busy People
• Mark Warren’s article, "Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion"
• Pierre-Yves Néron's Seeing Like a Firm: Social Justice, Corporatiosn and the Conservative Order
• Scherer and Palazzo's 2007 article, "Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility: Business and Society Seen From a Habermasian Perspective"

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