MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Should Businesses Fight for Democracy?

Businesses are embedded in society and societal institutions. Each business and each stakeholder — from customers, suppliers, and employees to communities, regulators, and financiers — has an ethical perspective, a political view, a professional interest. Individuals within each stakeholder group have ideas about how they want their lives to matter in the world.

Those connections to the world outside of business are often strong motivators for decision-making. They influence how and where businesses create opportunity for workers, how partnerships form, how suppliers get treated, how far companies will go to fulfill contractual obligations, and what organizations choose to invest in.

These decisions are often described as primarily financially motivated. But humans — and their businesses — are more complex than that.

About the Author

R. Edward Freeman is University and Olsson Professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He tweets @re_freeman. Joseph Burton is executive director of the Institute for Business in Society at the Darden School.

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