Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happen [Hardcover]

Why is TV so bad? Are corporations moral or sociopathic? Wade Rowland pondered these questions when he was fired from his job as a Canadian TV network news executive. Out of these ruminations emerged Rowland's book Greed, Inc. Rowland, the author of books about Galileo and the Internet, warns that corporations have grown too powerful and have spawned a "selfish, market-driven society." Greed, Inc. covers some of the same ground as Joel Bakan's bestselling book, The Corporation, but where Rowland stakes new ground is by investigating how the modern corporation is a perversion of the philosophy of Western thinkers like Adam Smith, who he suggests would be horrified to see how businesses run amok in today's world.

Rowland doesn't blame corporations themselves or their executives or shareholders. The problems, he writes, go much deeper and are not restricted to a few "bad apple" companies like Enron and WorldCom. Corporations can't be expected to act morally, Rowland argues. They are fundamentally amoral, with only a responsibility to follow their profit-making interests. How can they be expected to fulfill the "social good" without being forced to do so by society and government? At the root of the modern corporation, Rowland suggests, is a flawed assumption that comes from Rationalist philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries: that people are naturally greedy and selfish, while social institutions--such as companies--constrain people to act morally. If anything, Rowland writes, it's quite the opposite. Government should force corporations to serve our interests through stronger regulation and restrictions on their size and wealth. "Corporations are not human," Rowland says. "Corporations are tools." Greed, Inc. is not the most elegantly written or original of books, but it will appeal to readers interested in understanding the structural roots of recent corporate-fraud scandals. --Alex Roslin

Timely and important. No anti-capitalist rant, "Greed, Inc." is a wise book by a thinker and writer of great good sense and clarity. Wade Rowland shows how we have allowed the giant corporation to run amok amongst us, and offers ways to tame the beast and re-hitch it to the public good. All who are worried about the mounting damage done to society and nature in the name of profit should read "Greed, Inc." without delay. (Ronald Wright, author of "A Short History of Progress" )

In trying to understand the aberrant immoral behaviour of his former corporate colleagues, Wade Rowland has brilliantly excavated the ideological foundations of today's business corporation, revealing an inherently inhuman institution inimical to any kind of morality. (David F. Noble, author of "America by Design" and "Beyond the Promised Land" )

Why is television so awful? Why do drug companies hide unfavourable test results? Why do automakers market unsafe cars? Why is our environment poisoning us? Why is our food so unhealthy? Why are we working sixty-hour weeks? "Greed, Inc." places the blame for much of what ails contemporary society at the doorstep of a single institution - the modern publicly traded business corporation. We have become an uncaring society because the corporate ethos that informs virtually everything in our culture is uniquely and implacably selfish. The corporation exists for one purpose only: to make a profit. And such an objective trumps all others. Nothing else matters. This book traces the rise of the corporation from the Rationalist social engineering of the 18th century - as well as the parallel triumph of moral relativism, consumerism, enterprise culture, and other dominant value systems of our time. It shows how a series of psychological and philosophical misconceptions institutionalized greed and self-serving behaviour as a good thing for society. Indeed the origins of corporate culture seem in retrospect so preposterous as to defy belief - and yet these misconceived values now dominate our lives. Because of these notions of selfishness, we have arrived at a time when we seem at odds with almost everything around us. "Greed, Inc." is a groundbreaking book in that it reveals the roots of this social discontent for the first time through the lens of moral philosophy. Anybody who cares about our quality of life and the very survival of humanity will need to read this book.

Praise for Galileo’s Mistake

“Rowland provides a fascinating contribution to a debate that is particularly germane today and is likely to be equally important 300 years from now.” — Montreal Gazette

Wade Rowland is the author of more than a dozen books, including "Galileo's Mistake"; "Spirit of the Web"; and "Ockham's Razor". He is a former holder of the Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Communications at Ryerson University in Toronto and currently lectures in the social history of communications technologies at Trent University in Peterborough. He lives near Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife, Christine.