In Chapter 3, I argue that boards of directors should develop their own perspective on the future of the firm in collaboration with the CEO, and design a strategy road map. In most industries, companies are experiencing disruptions as a result of technology, protectionism, climate change, geopolitical risks and new consumer preferences. The strategy road map should include various dimensions: what makes the firm unique, its value proposition for customers, the required capabilities and resources to compete, specific strategic choices to sustainably create economic value and the type of firm the board would like to develop in the long term. The board of directors should provide a context where members can effectively reflect, discuss and approve the company’s strategy. The board should not only approve the firm’s strategy: It should offer an effective context for discussion and reflection on the strategy, business model and key decisions.

The control and ownership of land is one of the surest ways to generate wealth. Moreover, if you own land or treat it as property, you can accumulate it and bequeath it to whomever you like, creating large inter-generational holdings of wealth. This is often why, when revolutions happen, one of the first questions that come up is about land, its ownership, and its potential redistribution. In this chapter, Bafford looks at what happened to land ownership across a number of revolutions in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bafford identifies how predominantly white landowners in South Africa were able to keep their wealth. They did so with the help of property-protecting neoliberal statecraft that prioritized the protection of the existing regime of property rights rather than challenging inequality of land ownership. In Zimbabwe white landowners lost many of their holdings. Still, Bafford goes on to show the way that international, neoliberal governing organizations punished Zimbabwe’s attempt at racial restorative justice with reference to the protection of property rights and the free flow of investement capital.

Most people who eat aren’t able to see much of our contemporary food system. This is deliberate. As world population has grown, so too has the food system become increasingly elaborate, specialized, and industrialized, all to the point that even those who live near fields or farms can likely only see a part of where our food comes from. This chapter explains a bit of how this system works, and what values it prioritizes. King and Rissing suggest that much of the food system is guided by a sort of market imperialism that values growth in yields and profit over other values that we might associate with food, values such as nutrition, variety, and environmental sustainability. It also demonstrates how neoliberal marketization does not function independently of public government but is sustained and developed by government interventions. By contrast, King and Rissing look at nonindustrial contemporary food systems to show what alternatives might look like, and to illustrate just how well they can address many of the values and aspirations we have for food systems. The alternative approach with its emphasis on food sovereignty, challenges the international frameworks of neoliberal governance that prioritizes the stimulation of market competition.

This chapter defines green buildings as a holistic concept and as promoted by the Green Building Movement. It reviewa the theory and empirical evidence of market failures and various barriers that have shaped the Green Building Movement, which aims to improve environmental footprints in a way that is profitable to participants. It draws upon the market for lemons and signaling theory to explain the role of ecolabeled buildings in overcoming information barriers. To the scholar, this mission seeks to align public and private benefits through reduction of information asymmetries and externalities of building practices. It then characterizes the scope of green building policy initiatives across the United States and across the globe. It also shows the prevalence of the Green Building Movement around the globe.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volume. It presents our conviction that there is a bias toward pro-market, pro-capitalist (which we call “neoliberal”) solutions in how people solve problems nowadays, and how people learn to solve problems in universities. We explain what these default neoliberal biases are, and why they are often harmful. We also explain how the case chapters in this book comparatively lay out a series of alternatives to these neoliberal ways of solving problems.

As we noted in our Introduction, one thing that distinguishes neoliberalism from plain old liberalism was the recognition that the state was necessary to allow market-based activities to occur. There needed to be regulatory and judicial guardrails that allowed for and even encouraged market activity. That said, this conception of the state was meant to indicate that the state creates an arena for market life to happen, not that the state should become a consumer. However, an unfortunate reality of life for neoliberal thinkers is that the state is often an outsized participants in markets. Moreover, the state often attempts to exercise its values (say, reducing greenhouse emissions) in the consumption choices that it makes. Consuming with values in mind is particularly complicated when you have a state and international organizations set up to allow neoliberal market arenas. This chapter attempts to capture just how complicated and confusing this situation can be by hearing about Groot’s experience managing government procurement in an EU nation. What quickly becomes apparent is how vertigo-inducing the whole exercise is, and how easy it is to get carried away by various institutional constraints and priorities that often don’t make much sense. Rather than presenting a viable contrast case, this chapter provides a view from the inside of one our eras biggest market actors, the state.

At school, what should kids eat for lunch? Mundane as this question seems, this chapter suggests that the answer we give can put us anywhere along a political and ideological spectrum. On the one hand, if we feel that people should choose their own meals and that parents, not schools, should police what their kids eat, we run the risk of bringing the larger society’s inequalities into the lunchroom. If, on the other hand, we allow for state-sponsored meals, we run the risk of losing control over a basic aspect of our lives, and ceding it to the whims of outside political actors. What to do?. Patico argues that as things stand, in the United States enshrining individual choice and responsibility around student eating habits has led to a situation in which much school food is suspect and wealthy parents are able to separate their own children from eating it. In the context of a society shaped increasingly by market imperialism, this is the downside of privileging an ideal of consumer choice as well as the ideal of taking individual responsibility for optimizing your children’s meals. One possible corrective to this is to consider what school lunches would look like under several different types of collective planning and alternative moral scrutiny which challenges structural inequalities and corresponding differences in the purchasing power of parents.

This chapter compares the ways that two similarly sized cities, Chicago and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of how privatization of a common good according to money-lending logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of recent corporate crises and their relationship with the dominant model of boards of directors. I also present a brief historical review of boards of directors and explore why the current generation of boards that was born in the 1990s has fallen short of its expectations. Understanding why the current model has not been effective is relevant. In parallel, a close-up view of the inner workings of some boards sheds additional light on a conundrum overlooked by large-sample statistical studies. A board should understand the company’s business and the industry in which it operates, make sure its long-term orientation is sound and expand their scope beyond simple shareholder value maximization.

This chapter offers a theoretical framework to understand the variation of ecolabel design based on the content, governance, and context of the label.Drawing upon green clubs and signaling theories, we suggest that ecolabels vary based on the stringency of the certification program, measured by the number and criticality of required standards, and the extent to which the requirements of these certifications incentivize the provision of public goods. We characterize important dimensions of ecolabels such as their impact, the value of the signal, and the extent to which they address externalities and information asymmetries. To illustrate these concepts, we take a closer look at GreenCo, a business sustainability rating system in India, and a sample of over 50 different agricultural ecolabels. This examination shows the important variation in factors like types of requirements, stringency, and institutional processes that govern the labels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, broader stakeholder engagement is associated with more emphasis on public benefits, while more surprisingly industry sponsorship does not tend to be found among the more lax labels with less public benefit.

Effective boards should evolve from their emphasis from compliance and box-ticking to promoting a healthy corporate culture that underpins individual and corporate behavior. This is the theme examined in Chapter 7. Corporate culture can serve as a driver of employee engagement, inspiration and creativity and competitive advantage. This is a delicate issue: The board does not define corporate culture, yet can still enhance and protect it, and ensure the company possesses a culture that fosters collaboration, customer orientation, initiative, accountability, transparency, diversity, inclusiveness and integrity, all of them qualities that help develop the organization for the long term.