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A recent conversation with colleagues

I was recently talking with colleagues, professors in the Quinlan School of Business. A conversation developed between two of them. I’ll just call them Professor A and Professor B.

Professor A was telling us about how some faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, and in particular, faculty having to do with ecology or environmental issues, think that business is the problem rather than the solution.  As I listened, I presumed this meant that business schools are part of the problem rather than part of the solution, but this was not openly stated.  Professor A then said that business is a force for good.  Professor B gently and quietly said, in an a typically understated manner for this professor, “Or for bad.”

The response from Professor A was quick. “No.  Business is a force for good, always!” Professor A then added, “I can’t imagine any business person waking up in the morning and asking themselves, ‘How can I screw other people today?’”

While Professor A could not imagine business people scheming against other people, our intellectual leader, Adam Smith, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) could. In The Wealth of Nations (Book IV, Chapter VIII, the page number will vary depending on the edition used) he wrote,

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public …

But that is a digression.

At this statement from Professor A, my thoughts immediately ran to the Lake Calumet area on the far south side of Chicago. Lake Calumet is the largest body of water within the City of Chicago. It is a large, but shallow, lake. Just over five years ago, the United States Environmental Protection Agency declared the Lake Calumet cluster (a cluster of sites around Lake Calumet) a Superfund site. (Joel Hood, March 3, 2010, “Wetlands declared superfund site by EPA, Chicago Tribune, (retrieved from from Loyola’s library system, which means this link may not work for everybody.)

Several areas within this cluster are hazardous. That is partly why it is a Superfund site. Those doing the cleanup wear masks and have a supply of air or oxygen.

So I am thinking to myself, “How did all those chemicals get into the water and into the ground around Lake Calumet?”  Did they just get up and walk over there by themselves?  I don’t think so. Is my family, and the general public, responsible for this mess because we dump our excess cleaning supplies there? I don’t think so. These chemicals got there because businesses dumped them there. While it is not known who, specifically, did the dumping (that is another reason why it is a Superfund site – ownership of these dumped chemicals cannot be traced) it is known that it was not an accident.  It was purposeful, often carried out under the cover of darkness – at night. To be a Superfund site we also know it was not a one-time event. It was a series of planned acts, by businesses, that took place over many years.

So while Professor A cannot image business people getting up in the morning and wondering how they can screw the public, we have plenty of evidence that some do. Take, for example, Emmanuel Raufflet and Albert J. Mills’ case book, The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business (Greenleaf Publishing, 2009). If Professor A was correct that businesses do only good then there would be no need to write a book on the dark side of business.

Why do businesses do things like dump chemical waste in public waters? It is generally done to save costs. As such it is part of a long tradition of privatizing profits and the socializing (some) costs. In economics we euphemistically call these externalized costs. I prefer direct expressions. It is socializing some of the costs of production. Who, after all, is going to pay to clean up this newly listed Super Fund site? Society at large will pay for it. So we have socialized those costs.

And what about the recent news that, particularly, we (the public) may actually be buying food that is mislabeled or misrepresented on purpose – again because of cost factors.

If you do not know what I am talking about, you have not been reading the newspapers or listening to the news. Mislabeled fish is apparently flooding the marketplace. Roughly one third of the seafood sold in U.S. grocery stores, seafood markets, restaurants and sushi venues, is being swapped for species that are cheaper, overfished, and perhaps even risky to eat.

This isn’t the first time this behavior has been reported in the realm of fish. And now it is being reported, for Europe, in the realm of ground meat. It is mostly horsemeat that is hitting the news but it is also swine (pig) at is being discovered in what was supposed to be ground beef. Pork has some religious objections, so it is a really bad idea to mix it in with beef and sell it unlabeled. And there is nothing wrong with horsemeat – there are places where it is a regular on the menu. What this is really about is the same thing the fish fraud is about – selling one thing as thought it were another and keeping it a secret. This qualifies, in my view, as one of Adam Smith’s conspiracies against the public.

We could also discuss the recent expose on junk food, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk food,” that recently appeared in the New York Times and broadcast on NPR.

Going back to my theme, Professor A was clearly perturbed that some in the College of Arts and Sciences think business is sometimes the problem. Maybe the constant denial, by the professorate, of the undeniable is what gives businesses and the nation’s schools of business a bad name among those that study this stuff.

Is business always a force for good and only good? Or is Professor B correct in appending “Or for bad.”   If it is, rather, that business can be a force for good, then the nation’s schools of business have a responsibility to help make sure they are a force for good and it just does not seem right to deny, especially emphatically, that they are sometime a force for bad.

I know I work to be sure the business leaders of tomorrow are a force for good, as do most of my colleagues. I do not think for a minute, however, that all businesses are always and without exception a force only for good.

It is just a thought. Now you know what I think, what do you think?

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