ABSTRACT
212The late Charles Reich, a visiting professor at Yale Law School, in his 1995 book: “Opposing the system,”1 talks about how individuals have no power, being beholden to the organizations who pay their salaries, and governments have diminished power as everything they do is in the open, and political incumbents have a four- to five-year tenure. Businesses, with their profit motive, cannot serve human needs, nor does the focus on growth consider the costs like urban decay, family breakup, environmental degradation or, indeed, the future – for many executives it’s me, me, me, and now, now, now. Reich considered that the Bill of Rights is regularly violated in the workplace. The business system was responsible for the corporate raiding of America and the entrenchment of a managerial elite whose only motive is profit for the few, he said, and believed that “we need a new consciousness.” There is no doubt that Reich’s book is polemic in nature, but many of the points he makes ring true for all that. Charles Handy believed that corporations were not democratic in any way.
