Stanford University Press Blog

Sustainability Is Needed for Business Leadership

According to the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization running the “We” advocacy campaign that former Vice President Al Gore launched this morning, “many Americans are concerned about climate change but don't know what to do about it.” Stanford author Chris Laszlo is reaching out to business leaders to show them that they can actually become more profitable by making their companies environmentally conscious.

A “clean energy economy” is one of the solutions proposed by the We campaign, which agrees with Laszlo that sustainable business practices would help the US economy:

A clean and efficient economy would “lead to over 3 million new green-collar jobs, stimulate $1.4 trillion in new GDP, add billions in personal income and retail sales, produce $284 billion in net energy savings.”

In a recent interview, Laszlo argues that the economy has fundamentally shifted so that US companies must pay attention to environmental concerns if they want to remain competitive:

What has happened is that the marketplace has changed and today if you want to make an economic profit you have to pay attention to environmental and social issues in your business… because they’ve become enablers of competitive advantage. So we’re back to just a single purpose gain. So companies have come out with products that have environmental intelligence built in. Consumers tend to prefer those products if they don’t have to pay more for them.

Laszlo’s book, Sustainable Value, not only presents his argument for the necessity of sustainable business practices, but also provides the tools necessary for leaders to move their companies along that path.

Eisenhower Unmasked

In Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address as president of the United States, he said of the Cold War, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and libert y may prosper together."

According to Ira Chernus, author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity (2008), the peace that Eisenhower spoke of was actually a constant state of “apocalypse management” which would involve the endless management of nuclear threats. By using discourse that assumed that the United States would forever face an enemy bent on destroying it, the author contends that Eisenhower made national insecurity a way of life in America.

The author discusses Eisenhower’s Cold War discourse in a recent article entitled “The Real Eisenhower” for History News Network (March 17, 2008) in which he utilizes a rich source of Eisenhower quotes (often juxtaposing excerpts of public speeches with private statements made within his cabinet) that reveal the former presidents’ thoughts and strategies on the threat of Communism and nuclear attacks.

He describes Eisenhower’s Cold War policy as one, “that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would 'shoot your enemy before he shoots you'; a man who believed that the U.S. could 'pick itself up from the floor' and win the war, even though 'everybody is going crazy,' as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got 'shellacked and nobody got too 'hysterical.'”

In looking at these quotes, Chernus says, “That’s how one president talked about nuclear war, a president who is now especially widely admired across the political spectrum….[I]t should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask profoundly important truths.”

Chernus reminds us that Eisenhower’s legacy of insecurity is still with us today, and his sentiments on the presidential masking of truth is a poignant one especially upon the 5 year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the nearing end of the Bush administration.

A government report released earlier this week confirmed that the American economy will see a recession in 2008. Families across the country are facing foreclosure on their homes, and the dollar is at record lows.  In an article in The Chronicle Review, David Glenn asks why presidential candidates, especially Republicans, still propose tax cuts based on the now-debunked supply-side economic theory:

The hopes of the supply-side theorists of the 1970s, who proposed that revenue would often rise after tax cuts, have been thoroughly dashed by the last 30 years. Federal revenue fell after Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts and again after George W. Bush's 2001 cuts. The vast majority of economists now say that tax cuts must be matched by spending cuts, or deficits will ensue.

For an answer, he turns to The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, released this week by Stanford University Press. Author Isaac William Martin argues that “Republican political leaders (falsely but successfully) interpreted Proposition 13's success in California in 1978 as a broad mandate for cutting income taxes as well as property taxes,” a policy that has shaped and symbolized the party every since.

Martin’s showcasing of how the Republican Party came to so deeply associate itself with tax cuts helps us understand why President Bush stands so firmly by his economic policies in the face of economic upheaval. 

Creating Sustainable Value

Chris Laszlo argues in his latest book, Sustainable Value: How the World’s Leading Companies Are Doing Well by Doing Good, that far from being a cost to society and business, sustainability is emerging as a huge opportunity for both.  CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies—General Electric, Toyota, and Wal-Mart, to name just a few—are motivated by the desire to gain competitive advantage in a business environment transformed by rising fuel prices, widespread concern over the impact of climate change, and heightened consumer awareness of health and environmental issues. For more information on the book visit: www.sustainablevaluebook.com

Reforming Sociology

In the January 2008 issue of Contemporary Sociology, Theodore Gerber described On Sociology, Second Edition by John Goldthorpe as “useful, erudite, and occasionally provocative.” Goldthorpe, one of the leading minds in the field of sociology and one of the architects of rational action theory (RAT), “finds sociology in a troubling state of disarray,” primarily due to a disconnect between research and theory.

This expanded and updated edition of On Sociology argues for a more empirically rigorous approach to sociology and illustrates the dangers of the pluralism that currently rules within sociology: Goldthorpe hopes that RAT will “serve not as a basis of exclusion but rather as an exemplar of shared standards, in relation to which methodological discussion and debate can be carried on expressive of a genuine pluralism rather than of a merely convenient, ‘anything goes’ counterfeit.”

In his review, Gerber discusses the limits of Goldthorpe’s proposal, pointing to the difficulty to establishing empirical regularities when doing sociological research. This critique should spark exactly the serious debate that Goldthorpe would like to see among sociologists.

Policy vs. Hope

The Texas and Ohio primaries are coming to a close and many speculate that the results could clinch the democratic presidential nomination for either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Clinton. Both candidates have been seesawing in terms of votes in a very unpredictable year of primaries and caucuses. But Obama has been on a winning streak, sweeping the last eleven primaries straight.

Many speak of Obama’s charisma and his campaign of hope that has enthralled disillusioned citizens. Hip-hop artist Will.I.Am composed a music video featuring clips of Obama's "Yes We Can" speech and a multitude of celebrity cameos. To date, the video has received over 5.5 million hits on YouTube. In January, Caroline Kennedy Schlosser wrote an Op-ed in the New York Times, endorsing Obama and likening him to her late father, perhaps the most inspirational and hopeful president in our nation’s history.

But not everyone is swept up in Obama mania. Hillary Clinton has criticized his campaign for relying on false hope and rhetoric instead of experience and a track record of successful policy.  According to a MSNBC article, Clinton is quoted as saying, “I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change…And we don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered."

Stanford University Press author Hirokazu Miyazaki disagrees. Miyazaki, a professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (2004), has focused his research on the question, “How do we keep hope alive?” In a guest column for the Ithaca Journal, Miyazaki analyzes Obama’s campaign and contends that Clinton and others are perhaps underestimating the American people’s hunger for hope.
 
He says, “Research on hope in diverse cultures shows that one individual's hope often can replicate itself, in a specific way, in the lives of many other individuals. The rhetoric of hope may seem general, abstract and intangible; but the effect of hope is often quite specific, personal and substantive.”

“Imagine what would happen if every American who has long endured disappointment, fear and hopelessness suddenly regained hope about the future. By that very fact, the most radical change imaginable would already have happened.”

The policy vs. hope debate and the presidential primaries will continue on through the end of June.

Charles Gati, E.E. Cummings, and Hungary 1956

In a newly released paperback, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, Charles Gati relates new facts about the Hungarian revolution and its suppression by the Soviet Union in a political thriller that combines the immediacy of an eyewitness account (the author was a 22-year-old reporter in Budapest during the uprising) with the experience and expertise of a scholar. Gati points out, “The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago--and Americans need to hear that in the future we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home.”

Denying neither Hungarian heroism nor Soviet brutality, Failed Illusions fundamentally alters our picture of what happened during the 13-day uprising that began on October 23, 1956. Gati finds that the young revolutionaries were brave but their expectations unrealistic, and their leader, Imre Nagy, a reform communist who headed the revolutionary government, could not rise to the occasion by steering a realistic course between his people’s demands and Soviet interests.

Gati’s account exposes a crucial gap between words and actions in U.S. policy. In his view the United States was all talk, no action, and offered mixed signals at best. It encouraged the revolutionaries with promises of “liberation” and the “rollback” of Soviet power from Eastern Europe. The book exposes Washington’s ambivalence by citing Vice President Nixon, who said at a top-secret NSC meeting in July 1956 that “it wouldn’t be an unmixed evil” for the U.S. if the Soviets were to invade Hungary. Interestingly, U.S. failure to aid the Hungarian revolutionaries is also the subject of a poem by E.E. Cummings, Thanksgiving 1956.