In Chapter 6, I argue that the new generation of boards needs to go beyond monitoring senior managers to work harmoniously as a team capable of addressing the firm’s challenges. The process of turning individual board directors into a high-performance team is complex. This chapter explores how the collegial dimension of the board’s efforts can translate into effective teamwork and team development, concurrently strengthening the impact of the team as whole and contributions from individual members. Moreover, the very nature of boards of directors’ role – limited dedication, diverse backgrounds and sporadic meetings – requires boards to work collaboratively with the CEO and the top management team. The board of directors appoints the CEO and, depending on the firm’s statutes, confirms the key executive appointments the CEO wants to make. This decision should be founded on professionalism and trust. A constructive and highly professional relationship between the board of directors and the CEO is essential.

Ecolabeled green buildings can have a diverse array of characteristics. Their superior environmental performance can include things like energy efficiency or water efficiency; using cleaner and lower carbon energy sources; sourcing construction materials with sustainable practices; or site selection for the buildings so as to reuse and rehabilitate brownfields or encourage use of public transportation or bicycles. The multidimensional nature of “greenness” for green building is an essential feature of these ecolabels and the Green Building Movement more broadly. The holistic approach to greener buildings embraces flexibility, diversity, and innovation over strictly prescriptive or one-size-fits-all approaches. In this chapter we unpack the diversity of green buildings using attributes such as the publicness and the private marketing benefits of an organization’s ecolabeling strategy to provide improved understanding of the manner in which firms certify green. Green building strategies are classified as altruist, pragmatist, green club, and greenwash. By providing better understanding of green building strategies, our understanding of sustainability strategies by firms and organizations is enhanced.

In Chapter 2 I discuss how boards can work on the company’s purpose and shift their attention from profit maximization alone to become a purpose-driven organization. A corporate purpose offers a concise explanation of why a company exists and what it intends to do for customers, employees and society in a sustainable way. It provides a frame for shareholder and stakeholder expectations. With the growing emphasis on sustainability and ESG dimensions, firms need to develop an overall purpose-driven framework to ensure these pieces fit together and are well integrated into the firm’s strategy. Boards should learn how to work with the firm’s purpose, make it consistent with the firm’s strategy and understand how their work can reinforce or erode corporate purpose.

Chapter 10 presents a summary of the reflections and learnings stemming from the clinical studies and the model of the board as the firm's steward. It also examines its implications on how to develop the board of directors of the future and the functions that it should embrace to govern companies effectively.

Sustainability has become the privileged way businesses, NGOs, and governments think about actions they might take to remediate environmental problems and be good actors vis-à-vis natural resources and our shared climate. In turn, the way that sustainable actions are accounted for is in the language of “impacts” in which various accounting schemes seek to tabulate and communicate the degree to which some sustainable action has an effect in the world. The purpose of generating a quantifiable, representable impact is so that consumers might decide that it makes a company or product more worthwhile and more deserving of a consumer’s money on a market. On a market, a consumer has the ability to decide that other qualities (price, brand, convenience, etc.) could potentially outweigh good environmental action. The purpose of explaining all this is to show just how limited a utilitarian approach (one in which goods are measured, weighed, and seen as interchangeable) to fixing environmental problems is. What Archer demonstrates is that by tracking environmental action in terms of comparable, fungible impacts, one allows corporate actors to count their pollution or bad action, and continue to do it anyway, both masking it behind impact measures and abdicating any final responsibility to consumers. At the close of the paper, Archer offers a different way of thinking about sustainable environmental action, one that draws on various strands of indigenous thinking to illustrate what it would look like and how much more effective things would be if we understood good environmental action in terms of nonnegotiable values (in philosophy language, a “deontological” approach).

The enormity of climate change and the many ways one might address it is overwhelming. This chapter examines two movements that have sought to do so. One, the green bond movement, seeks to explicitly create opportunities for market participants to prioritize labeled sustainable and climate investment. The other, the divestment movement, seeks to move investment away from fossil fuel companies via direct political action that pressures large entities like universities and nonprofits to take their money out of fossil fuel companies and emissions intensive industries. Tripathy’s argument is twofold. First, he describes how the two movements, despite profound ideological and cultural differences, share an underlying assumption that climate change can be addressed by manipulating the workings of financial markets. Our increasing realization that neither of these movements, in isolation or in combination, has been even remotely successful in addressing the problem of climate change should remind us of a classical critique of market solutions: markets are inadequate when it comes to efficiently addressing problems with very distant and broad societal consequences. The chapter thus suggests that the failure of two market approaches with such diverse profiles should make us expand our political will and imagination to look beyond markets for future means to address climate change. Second, Tripathy suggests that in our necessary endeavor to develop alternative solutions, we may seek inspiration from the divestment movement. What is particularly interesting in this movement is its emphasis on democratic ideals of participation and inclusion in the political process itself, as well as its broad conception for a necessary agenda of societal change required to address climate change.

This chapter surveys the landscape of 14 of the best-known green building labels and some of their attributes. These labels include LEED, BREEAM, WELL, Green Star Australia, Green Mark Singapore, Green Globes, DGNB, BEAM, Three Star China, HQE, Green Star South Africa, CASBEE, EDGE, and the Living Building Challenge. It engages in an in-depth investigation of LEED.Common categories in these programs include energy efficiency, water efficiency, and materials and resource use. While the building owners and occupants may also benefit from having more efficient energy and water systems or more safe materials, these categories also convey some greater environmental benefit to the public. Therefore, it classifies the standards in these categories as intended for public benefit. While most systems prioritize environmental protection above all else at least, three systems have multiple or competing aims. The traits of these labels are related to the framework for ecolabels developed in Chapter 3 and the role that the structure of the labels plays in facilitating peer effects and other competitive drivers of Green Market Transformation is examined.

This chapter is unusually long and might be best thought of as being made of three subchapters, all of which help explain the ideas that animate this book. In considering how you might use this chapter, it might be worth thinking about how the sections of this chapter answer different sorts of questions, and they may be of greater or lesser use depending on what you’re hoping to get out of the cases. The first section of this chapter (“What Is Neoliberalism”) explains what the authors and editors mean by “neoliberalism” and develops the specific idea of “market imperialism” to explain what exasperates the authors and editors. The second section (“The Problematic Theoretical Underpinning of Market Imperialism”) presents and critiques the arguments that undergird advocates of market imperialism. The final section (“Conclusion: Network of Thinkers and Art of Government”) explains how neoliberalism and market imperialism can operate even though individual people may not explicitly see themselves as advocates of neoliberalism and market imperialism. This last section also summarizes some common attributes of market imperialism and neoliberal thinking.

In the face of disruptive challenges, companies need to change. Chapter 4 explores the board’s role in the corporate transformation process when the pressure to change is intense, with particular emphasis on sustainability and digital transformation as two important drivers of major disruption. In many industries, climate change, the global pandemic and other potential natural disasters and growing geopolitical tensions add to this pressure to adapt and compel CEOs and senior managers to rethink their company’s strategy. Using the recent evidence of corporate transformations, I illustrate the unique role boards play in helping firms navigate this process, in collaboration with the CEO.

One characteristic of the United States has been overlapping waves of dispossession, settlement, and dispossession again. These waves of dispossession and settlement often come with big changes in economic and political systems, and with no small amount of violence. Here, Oliver writes about historically black communities who, in the wake of slavery, established townships on Indian land in what is now the state of Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, too, “Indian Land” was in part established when white settlers forced Indians out of other parts what is now the United States and into Oklahoma. A more recent wave of dispossession has come about due to the oil-fracking boom that has swept the great plains of the United States. With this boom has come oil speculation and speculators seeking to move black communities out of their homes and off their land. Often this sort of dispossession comes in the language of the home as an investment, and the home owner as an investor seeking to make profit. This logic of marketization challenges the idea of the houseowner as a cornerstone of the community and instead implies a self-understanding as a Homo economicus seeking to maximize personal utility. Oliver shows how the communities weigh these arguments as people decide what sort of community they want to live in and what money, if any, they should make from their homes.

One remarkable feature of market imperialism as it has affected welfare provision is just how deep it has become entrenched in the act of caring for people. Here, Clotworthy describes how the provision of eldercare in Denmark has been taken over by a system that aims to create idealized, active, and independent older people. Eldercare is thus increasingly subject to a “competition state” focused on optimizing costs by “responsibilizing” both care providers and senior citizens as rational and independent decision-makers. What Clotworthy shows, though, is that creating a welfare system with this sort of ideal in place runs the risk of ignoring the actual person sitting in front of you. The system acts more as a gatekeeper than a care provider, and thus leaves people alienated in their old age. Clotworthy contrasts this with eldercare systems that make a direct provision of care in order to show another way of caring for older adults.

This chapter argues that participation in voluntary programs can facilitate ongoing quality competition, enabling a race. It advances a theory of self-regulatory competition that may sustain this race. From this perspective, programs can be designed to facilitate a race to the top despite tendencies for label managers to compete for the lowest common denominator or for firms to greenwash and strategically overrepresent their environmental performance. Building on the premise underpinning demonstration projects improving supply chains and facilitating uptake of new technologies, it highlights how ecolabel programs can help transform markets. Once a market becomes crowded, new standards can be set, raising the bar for building performance. Data from the LEED program demonstrate that, over time, organizations and especially private firms invest additional resources to attain higher certification tiers, becoming greener as part of a race to the top in a voluntary, green building certification program.

One feature of neoliberal market imperialism is the idea that no corner of life should be off limits from market-based competition and profit. Rather predictably, this sort of economic thinking has found its way into the provision of healthcare, even in the context of countries with socialized, nationalized healthcare such as the United Kingdom. Here, Shapiro examines what happens to care for mothers and children in the United Kingdom after the introduction of neoliberal reforms and compares it to Sweden, both ostensibly national systems, but differing in their degree of market creep. Shapiro makes use of a legal, human-rights-based frame of analysis to show that birth in Sweden is far better for human well-being than it is in the UK. In terms of the overarching theme of the book, the chapter is an example of the advantages of increased government planning against neoliberal orthodoxy. Her analysis also points to the alliance between neoliberal austerity policies and the defense of traditional conservative “family values.”

This chapter takes stock of Green Market Transformation in the built environment and explores the potential to replicate this model. It notes that market-based solutions, while canonical in policy spheres, have failed to solve the climate problem. Instead, by drawing upon Elinor Ostrom’s work, opportunities for institutions and polycentric solutions as well as to leverage voluntary actions are observed. Rather than frame the problem of markets versus regulation, the limits of both are recognized and a way to harmonize them sought. When ecological crises require massive solutions, we look to harness the power of market forces rather than sideline one of our most effective institutions. A vital role is seen for policy to guide and foster markets to find and implement solutions. The scale of the problems facing us demands a grassroots, bottom-up approach that enlists the efforts of households, workers, and firms around the planet. The challenge for policy-makers is in facilitating that and in devising and supporting mechanisms so that voluntary action also serves the greater public benefit.

Healthcare is a wonderful, tragic case of the limits of individual capacity in making consumer choices. Often health and medical decisions are so complicated, so expensive, and have consequences so far in the future that it is practically impossible for ordinary individuals to make informed choices about their medical priorities. Given this, it is a natural reach for expert help (i.e., doctors), and the hand of government regulation (in the form of national insurance schemes). Here, Gersel, Souleles, and Thaning look at two national healthcare systems (Switzerland and the United States) that make use of market-based and for-profit mechanisms to provide healthcare. The crucial difference between them is that the United States remains wedded to the idea that individuals can and should make their own informed choices about their care (see pp. 32–36). In contrast, Switzerland has put a hard limit on what can reasonably be expected of individual choice in healthcare provision and has enacted a number of mandatory regulatory guardrails. It should come as no surprise, at this point in the case book, that citizens are taken better care off in the system that actually recognizes limits to individual consumptive behavior in healthcare, rather than sticking to the presumption of the hyper-intelligent Homo-economicus. It turns out we can in this case predict what people need, better than they themselves can through their purchases in an open market (see pp. 38–44).