Profit with Honor: The New Stage of Market Capitalism.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Book review

Profit with Honor: The New Stage of Market Capitalism. By Daniel Yankelovich. Yale University Press, 189 pages. $24.

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As much as anything, this relatively slim book by famed social researcher Daniel Yankelovich is an extended essay, a treatise on what he thinks is behind the corporate scandals of recent years--and what attitudes corporations need to take as a result. He sees an unfortunate culture of greed too often in place, abetted by deregulation and a "zero-sum game" in which too many high-ranking executives have thought about their own gains and not those of the broader organization and society.

A central point in the book is that what's needed most is a stronger sense of ethics, which Yankelovich translates into stewardship. "Our society is already too long on legal approaches to problems and too short on ethical ones," he writes. "The legal/regulatory side of business, however important, can neither fully account for the scandals nor prevent them in the future."

A far too common refrain these days, he writes, is, "I didn't break the law, so I didn't do anything wrong." Such a response "would have been unthinkable in the 1950s or earlier periods of American life, when society assumed that people's responsibilities encompassed far more...