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Book Review: Restoring Trust in American Business

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005) has among its purposes the “analysis of critical social and intellectual issues and the development of practical policy alternatives” (¶ 3). This book, the first output of the American Academy’s Corporate Responsibility Project, was stimulated by the corporate scandals and stock market gyrations of the 1990s that resulted in a decline in public confidence in the business and financial sector of the economy. According to one of the contributors, “Fairly or not, people have become willing to believe that executives, as a class, are greedy and dishonest” (p. 43). In a series of meetings and conferences held during 2003, a number of distinguished academics, experienced business leaders, lawyers, bankers, accounting experts, and others were asked to address this issue. The present volume contains short chapters and commentaries by 15 of the participants in these discussions, along with a set of recommendations by the project’s Steering Committee. All of the contributions focus on the need for changes in the behavior of business executives and their associated gatekeepers—accountants, lawyers, regulators, journalists, and so forth— that would make the business and financial sector more worthy of trust by the general public, particularly by investors. The participants apparently believe that, through a combination of malfeasance and misfeasance, all of these parties were involved in the criminal and negligent practices that led to the “irrational exuberance” of the 1990s and are therefore to be blamed for the collapse and loss of trust that followed. The opening article by Mark Roe (Harvard Law School) argues that the core problems of the present system arise from two very familiar characteristics: (a) the separation of ownership and control in large corporations and (b) the inadequacies of the fragmented state-federal regulatory system. As an example of the latter, he points out the peculiar role of the state of Delaware where corporate registration is a major industry and where corporate executives and lawyers exert strong pressure to insure that