Healing Capitalism

Jem Bendell is a guru in the world of Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate “Voluntarism”. And you need to be a guru to know just how empty and inadequate these concepts have now become. So prepare to have your cherished illusions unceremoniously set aside, and be forced to acknowledge that, when it comes to capitalism, there is no healing without a lot of pain.
Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director, Forum for the Future; author,Capitalism As If The World Matters

Radical thinking par excellence! Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines and ideological perspectives, Profesor Bendell shows how the corporate social responsibility agenda not only deployed an extremely blunt instrument – voluntary action – to reform capitalism but also missed the boat by ignoring core questions of economic governance. He directs our attention to the perverse nature of conventional monetary systems and the exciting potential of recent financial innovations to transform capitalism.
Peter Utting, Deputy Director, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)

Professor Bendell is a deep thinker among CSR experts and his last book was widely influential in helping practitioners understand CSR as a “social movement”. This new book completes a decade of analysis of initiatives in responsible business and finance. It is a useful resource for students new to this area, and an important source of reflection for those buried in the day-to-day work of CSR initiatives. It’s an opportunity for the reader to step back, look at the big picture and think about what has worked and what has not over the past decade. He argues that the “corporate responsibility movement” described in his last book must now address core questions of economic governance, including monetary systems, or be irrelevant in the tide of history. Some of his conclusions are radical, but they are usefully thought-provoking. Therefore, I recommend this book as an important addition to thinking on the topic.
Dr Anthony Miller, CSR Focal Point, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); co-founder, Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative

….Thanks to Ian Doyle of Lifeworth Consulting for writing this book with me 🙂

Hear me talk about it at the Ways with Words Festival.