The Growing Concern Over Business Responsibility

by William Frederick


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Abstract

The article focuses on the growing concern over business responsibility. Concern about business power is not new, but the past decade has seen a growing consciousness of the problems that business power can create in a democratic society. It is the contention of this paper that the heightened interest in the problem of business responsibility can be explained in terms of two developments of the twentieth century. One of these developments is intellectual and the other is institutional in character and both of them are related to the collapse of laissez faire as a philosophy and as an economic order. The disintegration of the world economy, starting early in the present century, signaled the beginning of the end for the laissez faire philosophy and all its supporting institutions. The trend, accelerated by the first World War and the subsequent monetary panics of the 1920s, culminated in the early 1930s The growth of the large scale corporation, there has been a tendency to divorce legal ownership from actual control of operation.

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