Joel Bakan has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.7★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is The Corporation.
The Corporation
Summary
Joel Bakan's book is a brilliantly argued account of the corporation's pathological pursuit of profit and power. An eminent law professor and legal theorist, Bakan contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. In the most revolutionary assessment of the corporation as a legal and economic institution since Peter Drucker's early works, Bakan backs his premise with the following claims: The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others - a concept endorsed by no less a luminary than the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. The corporation's unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. While corporate social responsibility in some instances does much good, it is often merely a token gesture, serving to mask the corporation's true character. Governments have abdicated much of their control over the corporation, despite its flawed character, by freeing it from legal constraints through deregulation and by granting it ever greater authority over society through privatization. Despite the structural failings found in the corporation, Bakan believes change is possible and outlines a far-reaching program of concrete, pragmatic, and realistic reforms through legal regulation and democratic control. Backed by extensive research, The Corporation draws on in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as CEO Hank McKinnell of Pfizer, Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and critic Noam Chomsky of MIT.
©2004 Joel Bakan (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
Childhood Under Siege
Summary
In Childhood Under Siege, Joel Bakan reveals the callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations and society's failure to protect them. The creator of the award-winning film and internationally best-selling book The Corporation, Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities. Focusing on the United States in particular, Bakan demonstrates how: Marketers target children with increasingly devious methods to manipulate their vulnerable emotions, cultivate compulsive behavior, and addle their psyches with violence, sex, and obsessive consumerism. More and more children take dangerous psychotropic drugs as pharmaceutical companies commandeer medical science and deploy dubious and often illegal marketing tactics to boost sales. Children's chronic health problems are rising dramatically as corporations dump thousands of new chemicals, in increasing amounts, into the environment, usually with the blessings of industry-influenced governments. Children as young as six are working illegally on farms, getting injured, becoming ill, and dying on the job, while the legal age for farm work remains a shockingly low 12 years old in the U.S. America's schools are becoming private-sector markets for profit-seeking companies, harnessing education to the needs of industry and promoting increasingly regimented and standardized learning. And more "As governments retreat from their previous roles of protecting children from harm at the hands of corporations," Bakan writes, "we, as a society, increasingly neglect children's needs, expose them to exploitation, and thus betray what we, as individuals, cherish most in our lives." Childhood Under Siege is a call to action to reverse these trends, and provides the necessary insights, information, and concrete proposals to do so.
©2011 Joel Bakan (P)2012 Post Hypnotic Press, Inc
The New Corporation
Summary
A deeply informed and unflinching look at the way corporations have slyly rebranded themselves as socially conscious entities ready to tackle society's problems, while CEO compensation soars, income inequality is at all-time highs, and democracy sits in a precarious situation. "A very important book, an arresting study directed to a central issue of the times" (Noam Chomsky), from the author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Over the last decade and a half, business leaders have been calling for a new kind of capitalism. With income inequality soaring, wages stagnating, and a climate crisis escalating, they realized that they had to make social and environmental values the very core of their messaging. The problem is corporations are still, first and foremost, concerned with their bottom line. In lucid and engaging prose, Joel Bakan documents how increasing corporate freedom encroaches on individual liberty and democracy. Through deep research and interviews with both top executives and their sharpest critics, he exposes the inhumanity and destructive force of the current order - profit-driven privatization subverting the public good, governments neglecting duties to protect the environment, the increasing alienation we experience as every aspect of life is economized, and how the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the unjust fault lines of our corporate-led society. Beyond diagnosing major problems, in The New Corporation, Bakan narrates a hopeful path forward. He reveals how citizens around the world are fighting back and making gains in ways that bolster democracy and benefit ordinary citizens rather than the corporate elite.
©2020 Joel Bakan (P)2020 Random House Audio