Introduction

Anti-corporate activists can gain much by critically engaging with managerialist writings that aim to ethically justify and thereby normalize the economic hierarchies of corporate control (see, e.g., Alvesson and Wilmott, 1992; Dunne, 2007). These neoliberal managerialist texts provide insights into the key concepts, arguments and discourses that inform and legitimize dominant structures. Thus, critical engagement with these works can identify lacunae, limitations, contradictions and ambiguities, and thereby unsettle these dominant discourses and assist in generating radical analyses and alternative anti-hierarchical practices. The aim here is that social anarchism provides some compelling critiques of dominant business ethics and business practice and that these antagonistic inquiries assist in the formulation of alternatives to corporocentric production.

This chapter applies anarchism's critical insights of market-based ethics and uses Milton Friedman's oft-cited essay ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (henceforth ‘The Social Responsibility’) as an exemplar of corporocentric ethics (prioritizing norms that produce an environment in which corporations might flourish). Friedman's account of the corporation is pertinent because, like the key works of Friedrich von Hayek (1973; 1978; 2001)and Robert Nozick, it epitomizes heroic neoliberalism with its prioritization of market relations (and thus exchange values). Friedman's text, however, specifically embodies these values in a particular institutional form, that of the corporation. In addition, Friedman promotes a particular socio-political environment which enables the burgeoning of these institutions over alternative social relations, which embody different norms and values.

This critique of Friedman's corporocentric ethics demonstrates the pertinence of sophisticated anarchist approaches to re-thinking the co-ordination of the production and distribution of goods. It highlights the inadequacies of liberal managerialism and state-centred responses. In this regard, the argument follows an older and much marginalized tradition in business ethics, from Aristotle and Marx, that considers corporate practice to be inherently unethical, as opposed to the Enlightenment position, following J. S. Mill and Immanuel Kant that views it as a consensual, productive activity, though open to individual malfeasance (Frederick, 2002: xiii–xiv).