![handle is hein.cow/anamacp0343 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD
The position of business in American society has long been a matter of con-
tention. The controversy even antedates the constitutional order itself, for the
Constitution that was drafted in 1787 was in no small part a result of commercial
and economic uncertainties experienced under the Articles of Confederation.
Businessmen were in the forefront of those who pressed for alteration of those
Articles.
During the twentieth century, the problem has become more widespread and
more intense. American society has changed from a series of small shop, agricul-
tural groups strung out along the Atlantic seaboard to a continental, highly in-
dustrialized superpower. The business of America is business, opined President
Coolidge less than forty years ago. Since that time, the fact that Americans live
in a business civilization is obvious.
The past half-century has witnessed the proliferation of the large corporation
as the characteristic form of business enterprise. Dominating the American
economy are the 500 or more largest corporations. Practices of these groups,
which have waxed to enormous size despite the presence of the antitrust laws,
tend to set the pattern for all business. The small businessman, so much a part
of the American heritage and so respected in the halls of Congress, increasingly
owes his livelihood in some way to the managers of the corporate giants. These
commercial and industrial titans operate as centers of economic power; as such,
they exert great influence over the tone of society and over the direction in which
the nation proceeds.
Those are the facts of business life and the assumptions upon which this
symposium is based. The most meaningful discussions of business ethics are those
which focus upon the practices of the managers of large corporations as they
touch and concern other groups and individuals and as they affect American
society generally. Peter F. Drucker put the point succinctly (but somewhat
differently) in the March-April 1962 issue of the Harvard Business Review:
[T]here is evolving [a new] concept of the role of the big-business enterprise in our
society. Big business . . . is private and accepted as such-in the sense in which
a big university is private. It is not government-run, but autonomous and under its
own rules, pursuing goals set by itself. But it is not a private affair and the
concern only of its stockholders, executives, and employees. It is an autonomous
institution-but a community asset and public in its conduct, in its mores, and in
its impacts. In the pursuit of its everyday private business, and in performing its
economic job, big business is therefore expected to further human values, and to serve
national purpose. This-rather than matters of ordinary honesty or fastidiousness
(e.g., kickback or call-girl problems discussed so ponderously today)-is at the core
of big-business ethics.
In other words, the ethical question of business enterprise is not so much that of
the personal peccadilloes of a few errant businessmen. It is the larger matter of
the relationships that the dominating corporations have with other segments of the
nation. Or, as stated in Bowen's Social Responsibilities of the Businessman,
the heart of the problem is the tension between self-interest and social obligation.
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