THE CORPORATE IDENTITY CRISIS
What is at issue here is not whether such charges are justifled—all too often they are. What is far more important is I he concept of the corporation they imply. For the Third Wave brings with it a rising demand for a new kind of institution altogether—a corporation no longer responsible simply lor making a profit or producing goods but for simultaneously contributing to the solution of extremely complex ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual, and social problems.
Instead of clinging to a sharply specialized economic function, the corporation, prodded by criticism, legislation, and its own concerned executives, is becoming a multipurpose institution.
A PENTAGON OF PRESSURES
The redefinition is not a matter of choice but a necessary response to five revolutionary changes in the actual conditions of production. Changes in the physical environment, in the lineup of social forces, inthe role of information, in government organization, and in morality are all pounding the corporation into a new, multi-faceted, multipurposeful shape.
The first of these new pressures springs from the biosphere.
In the mid-1950’s, when the Second Wave reached its mature stage in the United States, world population stood at only 2.75 billion. Today it is over 4 billion. In the mid-1950’s the earth’s population used a mere 87 quadrillion Btu of energy a year. Today we use over 260 quadrillion. In the mid-50’s, our consumption of a key raw material like zinc was only 2.7 million metric tons a year. Today it is 5.6 million.
Measured any way we choose, our demands on the planet are escalating wildly. As a result the biosphere is sending us alarm signals—pollution, desertification, signs of toxification in the oceans, subtle shifts in climate—that we ignore at the risk of catastrophe.These warnings tell us we can no longer organize production as we did during the Second Wave past.
Because the corporation is the main organizer of economic production, it is also a key “producer” of environmental impacts. If we want to continue our economic growth—indeed if we wish to survive—the managers of tomorrow will have to assume responsibility for converting the corporation’s environmental impacts from negatives into positives. They will assume this added responsibility voluntarily or they will be compelled to do so, for the changed conditions of the biosphere make it necessary. The corporation is being transformed into an environmental, as well as an economic, institution—not by do-gooders, radicals, ecologists, or government bureaucrats, but by a material change in the relationship of production to the biosphere.
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