When
‘CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY VS. BUSINESS ETHICS: A HEAD-ON COLLISION?’
By Dr. Elaine Sternberg, University of Miami
With comments by Fred Smith, President of the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and John Berlau, Director of CEI’s Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs.
Wine and cheese will be served. Space is limited.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2010
Time: 4-6pm
Where: Competitive Enterprise Institute
1899 L Street NW
12th floor
Washington, DC 20036
RSVP to [email protected] if you are able to attend.
Dr. Elaine Sternberg is author of Just Business: Business Ethics in Action, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics, (University of Leeds), and currently a visiting professor at the University of Miami. She has been an investment banker for fourteen years in London, New York and Paris, and founded and ran two multi-million-pound profitable businesses. Dr. Sternberg has lectured on business ethics at the London Business School and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics. She is also a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Institute for Economic Affairs.
Dr. Sternberg elaborates on the position of Milton Friedman and other critics of the doctrine of “corporate social responsibility” and argues that the use of a business by its management to pursue various social goals violates the fiduciary duty to owners and shareholders. While she believes businesses should act ethically and legally in their communities, she rejects that a “stakeholder” has any claim that should be put on parity with those of shareholders, and in fact holds that it would be a breach of ethics for a business to do so.
Given that a major cause of the mortgage fiasco we are still sorting through was legislation mandating that banks serve “stakeholders” by making mortgages available to most everyone, Dr. Sternberg’s lecture is sure to be a lively and enlightening post-election policy chat.
The live stream of event can be viewed below or on CEI’s Ustream Channel:
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