As a student I’ve heard lots of hopeful rhetoric about the dawning of the Age of Enlightened Corporations, where businesses and other groups will hire less narrowly-educated experts and more “well-rounded” “creative thinkers” with liberal arts degrees who can “problem solve” and deal with “ethical issues.” The bottom-line, so the thinking goes, is to be supplemented with imaginative and moral considerations, supposedly to infuse the corporate sector with long-term strategies for sustainable, just practices. It don't buy it.

Of course good education makes for better thinkers. But should we be propping up corporations with our intellectual energy? Shouldn’t we be weakening the corporatist stronghold on society, instead of strengthening it? When the Economist newspaper detailed the corporate competition for talent (“The Battle for Brainpower”, Oct 5th 2006), it, not surprisingly, avoided raising any ethical questions like the one above, which is ironic, since ethics is said to be big business nowadays. The Economist reported that “intangible assets” (that is, intellectual talent) “have shot up from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 in 1980 to around 70% today.” Talent-intensive positions are also the fastest growing type of employment, making up some 40% of the American labour market and accounting for 70% of the jobs created since 1998. And in this age of globalization, “the same sort of thing is bound to happen in developing countries as they get richer,” it reports. “Even governments have got the talent bug,” it added. (I am aware that the article I quote from is nearly two years old now, and that national governments are forced to come to the rescue because of the collapse of global financial markets, but my overall argument still stands.)

Google, according to The Economist, “has assembled a formidable hiring machine to help it find the people it needs” and has “experimented with clever new recruiting tools, such as billboards featuring complicated mathematical problems.” Meanwhile, Google’s competitor Yahoo! “has hired a constellation of academic stars.”

Will these "stars" help these companies, or will genuine creativity and ethical input impede a business from turning a bigger profit? Conversely, are academics intellectually and ethically compromised by serving corporations?

Under the existing system of “voluntary restraint,” corporations are simply not capable of acting in sync with general public’s welfare. Corporatism and democracy are ideologically and historically opposed, even if neo-liberal voices like The Economist and Thomas Friedman buy into the intellectual myths that capitalism and democracy are natural bedfellows, or that capitalism gave birth to modern democracy.


An age old problem

Selling one’s educated mind and natural artistic abilities to the highest bidder is prostitution of talent. But this isn’t a new problem. Twenty-five hundred years ago Socrates, that model democratic citizen (doubtful, critical, articulate, loyal to his community), called his rivals, the sophists—the wandering teachers who sold rhetoric and expertise to the greedy and politically ambitious—“prostitutes of wisdom.” In 1989 David Suzuki penned an essay on how corporate ties with academic departments jeopardizes the intellectual independence of universities. He called it “The Prostitution of Academia.”

Suzuki pointed out the inherent conflict between university and industry when it comes to “talent”: “Private companies encourage a destructive kind of competitiveness that can be petty and mean. Secrecy becomes a priority when patenting ideas is a primary goal. And the lure of profit . . . ignores the broader questions of social responsibility and impact.” Both Socrates and Suzuki were saying that knowledge is not inherently good: it can be used for good or bad, and that the difference is a choice of the individual.


The Faustian bargain

When we think of selling one’s talent to the Devil it’s usually artistic talent. The superb Nazi propaganda of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl comes to mind. Stephen Spielberg (no lover of Nazis) was apparently unaware of the irony in lending his cinematic talent as an "artistic advisor" to the design of the Olympics in China, a country with near-genocidal human rights violations, including the child-labour-produced Olympic merchandise discovered by the IOC in the run-up to the games. In an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal around that time, Mia Farrow suggested Spielberg was "the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." Spielberg eventually withdrew his support.

China is hailed as an emerging globalization superpower, and its business practices, we all know, are anything but ethical. But no economist will criticize China (or India, that other growing global business juggernaut) for polluting the atmosphere or exploiting child labour because, of course, they must focus on their economic prosperity. Forget about forging internationally-binding laws to combat climate change, exploitive labour and environmental decay, business comes first! And both China and India have undoubtedly snatched up lots of “talent” to help them along.

Speaking of China (and the aforementioned Google), we all remember how Google complied with China's demands to censor certain "politically incorrect" websites inside the country. And, of course, Google didn't put up a fight. And why would it? Their concern is for corporate profit, not democratic access to information. The only thing that "talent" gives to Google in such a case is how to smooth it all over in the Wester media. It hardly improves their ethics.

Here’s the closest The Economist got to making a value judgment on the corporate battle for talent: “hat if a free market all sorts of political problems talented Western workers to compete with millions of clever Indians who are willing to do the job for a small fraction of the price?” Not only do they betray their favouritism towards the West, they appeal, as usual, to the God of the Free Market for guidance. What It says, goes. No room for ethics. As with any corporate battle, it’s sink or swim, even if all the water is fast drying up.


The wrong system

We live in a corporatist society with near-dead leanings toward participatory democracy. The policy of “voluntary restraint,” when it comes to corporations, with or without creative and ethical “intellectual talent,” is like letting the inmates run the asylum. Businesses will still be locked in a race to the bottom with other self-serving businesses, only with bigger brains to guide and disguise their destructive impulses. Conversely, since a legal responsibility of a business is to maximize profits, doing ethical business will always be a self-defeating disadvantage: a "You-go-first", "No-you-go-first" circular dynamic that, without external constraints (i.e.: government regulation) would go on forever. We can't reform corporate behaviour from inside the businesses, one-by-one, with a batch of new "creative" and "ethical" consultant employees. Creativity and corporatism is a simple non-sequitur; ethical business, an oxymoron. At best corporatism is a necessary evil—something to subdue, not encourage, just like our personal greed.

Joel Bakan, UBC law professor, argued in The Corporation that the business corporation is a sociopath since it operates to a logical yet absurd extreme on just one human trait - greed, our least human characteristic - with nothing else to balance it. Giving corporations the legal status of "individual" (like in the U.S.) not only mocks the idea that humans can operate less selfishly than a sociopath, it solidifies the assumption, so deeply entrenched in modern politics, that the market comes first and social welfare a distant second.

So, if Bakan is right about the sociopathic tendencies of busness corporations (and I think he is), let's take the analogy further and ask, Why would we equip a sociopath with “talent”? To help them justify their actions? To “ethicise” their behaviour? To help them get away with their crimes? No, we lock up sociopaths, or otherwise render them harmless to society and themselves. And so with corporations we should regulate, de-privatize, and regain control of the asylum, but not because corporations are inherently evil. Corporations are merely instrumental. They are tools, and a tool, like a hammer, has no mind of its own. It depends on a human agent, making decisions, choosing ethically (or unethically) what to do with it. A hammer can indifferently help build a house, or smash in somebody's skull. A business corporation is just a tool for making money. That's it. And like the sociopath (or hammer), they’re neither moral nor immoral because they lack a sense of ethics altogether: they are amoral. What is immoral is the choice to sell one’s talent to them.


The "Bottom Line"

“Educated” employees and hired “talent” won’t be revolutionizing corporate behaviour anytime soon. The profit motive and corporate loyalty would constantly cancel out anything ethical such as releasing vital information to the public or paying for externalities like pollution. The more ethical or long-term or inclusive of public concerns a company gets in its practices (not just in its public rhetoric), the more democratic it gets, and the less like a corporation it is.

So why not just take the logic all the way and demolish the mechanisms by which corporations wield power over the democratic process? That is, why not regulate them? The only worthwhile ethical advice “talent” can offer a corporation is to stop acting like a corporation and start getting in line with the public good. To give any other advice would be to prostitute that talent. In the end, there will be no Enlightened Corporations. Good corporate citizenship means no corporate citizenship.


An even less up-to-date version of this article appeared in The Republic of East Vancouver, issue of July 19 to August 1, 2007, No. 168