When we think about how innovation happens, we’re at a bit of a loss to understand it because our common-sense notions of innovation owe so much to Silicon Valley hype and propaganda. When we imagine innovation, we often think about strong personalities, aggressive and spectacular disruption, and ruthless profit-seeking. Scroggins suggests that much meaningful innovation actually happens beyond attempts at dispruptive innovation and attraction of venture capital where innovation is narrowly seen as a driver of economic activity. Instead, innovation tends to emerge from stable, rather boring groups of people working outside of job markets and for-profit corporations, on projects that are of personal or group interest, valuable to the people working on them for intrinsic, seemingly self-evident reasons. To show this, Scroggins describes two paths both taken in the same Silicon Valley do-it-yourself biotechnology laboratory. A neoliberal approach tried to use the democratization of a technology, in this case synthetic biology, as a lever to implement the classic disruptive strategy of entering low-end and opening new markets. The alternative approach proceeded on a slower and more deliberate path, without market forces and the promise of funding. What separated the alternative from the neoliberal approach is, according to Scroggins, its constant focus on community over commodity, and process over product.

Effective boards should assess the overall economic and social impact of their companies. In Chapter 9, I discuss how boards should set goals and policies and regularly disclose information about the firm’s financial and nonfinancial performance. In particular, boards should make sure that corporate purpose, as well as environmental and social dimensions, are well defined and coherently integrated into the firm’s strategy, business model, culture and people development policies. Financial and nonfinancial information should be disclosed and presented in a holistic and connected way. In this way, shareholders and stakeholders will have a deeper appreciation of the firm’s progress toward fulfilling its goals and purpose. At present, there is a heated debate on how to define standards for nonfinancial information and environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. Effective boards should take regulation into account, while making efforts to establish their own ESG objectives that are consistent with their strategy and business model, and disclose them in a clear manner.

This chapter reviews potential concerns of green building, including the environmental impact of the buildings, equity impacts, and environmental justice implications of ecolabeled buildings. These concerns typically revolve around the ultimate environmental impacts of green buildings and the equity implications of how we transition to a greener built environment. Green buildings may not be as green as we expect or want, and price premiums for green buildings work against affordability. Our green market transformation story is not a naïve, romantic, idealized story of perfectly sustainable practices overtaking our foolish old ways. This transformation story is messy, fraught with imperfections, and leaves ample room for improvement. In fact, that is part of the essence of this story: Iterative, ongoing improvements, building momentum toward a more sustainable system. Openly drawing our attention to these concerns and shortcomings can help us turn them into opportunities for continued gain and building on that momentum. Market transformation does not happen overnight, and it does not stop after a singular change. It is an ongoing evolution. This chapter reviews some of the shortcomings and concerns about this otherwise positive evolutionary path for green buildings.

Increasingly jobs are impermanent, insecure, and gig-based. From a neoliberal perspective gig work is imagined as granting more freedom than traditional forms of employment and gig workers are portrayed as entrepreneurs who work for themselves, maximizing their human capital in a flexible manner. In this chapter Elliott writes about what its like to be a tea plantation worker in Kenya, particularly given the rise of gig work in that sector. What Elliott found in the course of her field work is that many tea plantation worker are nostalgic for the permanent job and its attendant benefits, legacies of latecolonial welfare paternalism. In fact, what remaining permanent plantation jobs there are often seem like a good deal compared to gig work, since it may offer benefits absent in the gig economy, such as housing, water, and some kind of pension scheme and health insurance. Elliot does not argue in favor of a return to the “security” and “benefits” of traditional plantation labor, a highly hierarchized, exploitative, and often oppressive system with limited possibilities for social mobility. Rather, she suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the way work happens and is conceived under neoliberal conditions when traditional plantation offers preferable options to gig work. Human flourishing requires options beyond colonial tyrany and the neoliberal conception of freedom. She thus suggests that we may need to imagine ways of making a living that don’t involve a job.

Chapter 5 examines the critical challenge of the CEO’s appointment, development and succession plan. It also analyzes the role of the board in leadership development. Many corporate crises derive from a poorly managed CEO transition process. Boards that aspire to promote respected companies should focus on leadership development, talent management and succession plans. The ability to attract and develop stellar talent is a cornerstone of good governance and driver of superior performance. This is a vital responsibility for board members and one that requires professionalism, dedication and deep knowledge of the firm and its people.

This chapter looks at the provision of water by two different Southern California water agencies. One jurisdiction seeks to meet its water needs by financing and buying water from an expensive, energy-intensive desalination plant; the other jurisdiction successfully persuades its residents to reduce and change their consumption patterns of water and saves a huge amount of money as compared to the agency that bought into the desalination plant. What’s interesting from our book’s critical point of view is that the water agencies had different ideas about how people behave as water consumers. The jurisdiction that bought the expensive and wasteful desalination plant spent far more money and ended up wasting a huge amount of water because they didn’t even entertain the idea that people’s water consumption habits could change. Like good neoliberals they assumed that people were selfish, that they are attempting to maximize their individual utility, and that they had relatively stable preferences, which it would be foolish to attempt to change substantially. They paid dearly for those assumptions. In addition, the case demonstrates, how even in relation to complex problems such as handling water supplies, conscious human prediction and problem-solving can outperform market-based mechanisms. The case shows, in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy, that it is possible to plan.

When life throws you a problem, the solution our contemporary market moment proffers tends to be some sort of phone-based computer program, that is, an app. In this chapter, the authors take a look at apps designed to manage menstrual cycles. In so doing, the authors show that apps tend to individualize a problem, prize forms of efficiency and normative ideas of gender, all with a mystifying veneer of utopian market optimization and self-help. What’s interesting for us is the way that apps can individualize the problems they’re trying to solve and in so doing often seek to assist people in enhancing their human capital. The authors close with a contrast to anticapitalist punks seeking not individual optimization but collective liberation. In turn these punks offer those who menstruate a liberatory relationship with their own bodies.

This preface discusses the motivation of the book and provides an outline of the chapters. They discuss the need to assess the LEED program and its progress in stimulating Green Market Transformation in the built environment. They include acknowledgements to a number of co-authors on work that contributed to the book.

After the end of formal colonialism, numerous neoliberal international organizations stepped in to manage the international affairs of newly independent nations. The presumption of governments was that the best way to create national welfare was to let markets steer production by integrating the nation into an international capitalist order premised on market specialization and debt relationships. Here Freeman looks at the sort of industrial agricultural production that this kind of geopolitical arrangement engenders, focusing on pineapple plantations in Costa Rica. Cost Rican pineapple planatations are monocrops that exhaust the fertility of the land, provide poorly paid dangerous work, and spread toxic pesticides. International neoliberal governance structures with the overriding priority of stimulating market competion have enabled a system where production for the global is the objective. By contrast, Freeman shows what a food-growing setup can look like if it is oriented toward local production and away from international markets by examining “agroecology” in Haiti.

In Chapter 8, the spotlight is shareholder and stakeholder engagement. Boards that govern for the long term should actively engage shareholders – or oversee the interaction with them – learn from their suggestions and assure that the company has an adequate shareholder structure to carry out its activities and purpose. Boards should also understand how key stakeholders interact and create joint-value with the company, and how it can learn from them. Among the board’s responsibilities is to ensure the company has the right type of shareholders to pursue its purpose. A major assumption in many corporate governance studies is that shareholders are homogeneous and have the same preferences. The evidence indicates the contrary: Shareholders are heterogeneous. There is a wide variety of shareholders: family offices, pension funds, passive investors, private equity firm, hedge funds or governments, among others. Each shareholder is unique, with distinct time horizons and motivations. The board of directors needs to consider this diversity.

This chapter introduces a theory of Green Market Transformation, where emergent energy and environmental technologies gain widespread adoption in the marketplace. It articulatea a number of mechanisms that reduce transaction costs and disseminate information across the marketplace, such as building supply chains and improving demand for nascent technologies. Further, it reviews the global, European, and US uptake of ecolabeled buildings, providing evidence of the impact of the Green Building Movement. By providing examples of prominent ecolabeled buildings, it explores the motivations for ecolabel adoption and argues that firms and organizations compete to build ever-greener buildings. This competitive dynamic is evident across sports stadiums, where the authors detail a series of incremental improvements to stadiums over time.

Often when we think about investors we think about a singular heroic individual. This lends itself well to neoliberal ways of imagining people as individual economic agents. In this way of thinking, an entrepreneur with some amount of capital is able to heroically create a business due largely to their own drive, creativity, and hustle. What this accounting misses though, are the historical contexts and social resources that entrepreneurs draw on to make their businesses work. This is a problem too, if we imagine that individual entrepreneurial action will be adequate to pull people out of poverty or to right historical wrongs. In this chapter, Beresford takes us to South Africa to show the different resources that black and white entrepreneurs have when they start their businesses. Due to the legacy of apartheid, white entrepreneurs have access to more capital and deeper support networks that allow them to navigate the earlier, vulnerable stages of a business’s life. By contrast, many black entrepreneurs face a relatively resource poor environment for starting their businesses. Altogether, Beresford shows the limits of individualized thinking when it comes to entrepreneurs, and for using entrepreneurship to lift people out of poverty. The chapter also questions the theoretical assurance of neoliberalism that government should not intervene, but rather wait for the superior knowledge embedded in the market mechanisms to weed out the bad, and adequately increase the chances that good solutions flourish.

It’s easy to assume that all businesses (of any scale at least) are corporations, and that all corporations are run the same. They have executive leadership, boards of directors, and their overriding aim is to make profit for their investors. This is how most large corporations are organized and operate; and you could be forgiven for assuming that this is just the way things work. That said, close readers of this volume have likely intuited that this way of running a business is in fact historically specific, and owes a lot to neoliberal ideas about how a business and how society should work (hierarchically, with a minimum of democracy, and all organized to generate profits and reward shareholder owners). Here, Wood and Palladino take these assumptions apart by illustrating all the different way that other people (even workers!) can in fact own and control companies. One simple thing this chapter shows is that in designing a business or organizing a company, it doesn’t need to be top-down and oriented toward maximizing shareholder value; but can be oriented toward other values, and these values can be reflected in its organization.