THE THIRD WAVE
According to John C. Biegler, an executive of Price Water-house, one of the giant blue-chip accounting firms, “public confidence in the
American corporation is lower than at any time since the Great Depression. American business and the accounting profession are being called on the carpet for a kind of zero-based rejustification of just about everything we do… Corporate performance is being measuredagainst new and unfamiliar norms.”
Similar tendencies are visible in Scandinavia, Western Europe, and even, sotto voce, in the socialist industrial nations. In Japan, as Toyota’s official magazine puts it, “A citizens’ movement of a type never before seen in Japan is gradually gathering momentum, one that criticizes the way corporations disrupt everyday life.”
Certainly corporations have come under scorching attack at other times in their history. Much of today’s clamor of complaint, however, is crucially different and arises from the emerging values and assumptions of Third Wave civilization, not the dying industrial past.
Throughout the Second Wave era corporations have been seen as economic units, and the attacks on them have essentially focused on economic issues. Critics assailed them for underpaying workers, overcharging customers, forming cartels to fix prices, making shoddy goods, and a thousand other economic transgressions. But no matter how violent, most of these critics accepted the corporation’s self- definition: they shared the view of the corporation as an inherently institution.
Today’s corporate critics start from a totally different premise. They attack the artificial divorce of economics from politics, morality, and the other dimensions of life. They hold the corporation increasingly responsible, not merely for its economic performance but for its side effects on everything from air pollution to executive stress.Corporations are thus assailed for asbestos poisoning, for using poor populations as guinea pigs in drug testing, for distorting the development of the non-industrial world, for racism and sexism, for secrecy and deception. They are pilloried for supporting unsavory regimes or political parties, from the fascist generals in Chile and the racists in South Africa to the Communist party in Italy.
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