In Chapter 1, I address the continuing demand for a moral foundation for capitalism from the perspective of business leaders, business educators, and policymakers. These parties have been heavily impacted by the neoclassical economic view of capitalism based on narrow self-interest. I begin by discussing the demand for a moral foundation from the perspective of business leaders attempting to return to the stakeholder view of corporate responsibility that existed before the influence of the Chicago School. Next, I discuss the demand from the perspective of business educators attempting to return to the moral foundation provided by the early founders of the university-based business school. Finally, I discuss the demand from the perspective of policymakers attempting to return to an enlightened public policy that meets the broader needs of capitalist society. I conclude by outlining the leading characters and themes contained in this book. The search for a moral foundation for capitalism is not new. It has a long history going back to Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. The purpose of this book is to tell the story of this search through the lives and writings of its leading characters.

Sometimes, it is possible for an industry to preempt government regulation by mitigating the societal concerns that prompt the government to intervene. This is desirable when government intervention is likely to be clumsy. Executing preemption is difficult. The challenge lies in the absence of enforcement power: not every industry player, and sometimes no single industry player, necessarily has an incentive to do what is desirable for the industry as a whole. And, by construction, there is no Institution with the power to impose change. This chapter studies two general settings in which this challenge exists and, nevertheless, the industry is able to achieve optimal preemption.

A final possible path for change is from outside the system – that is, from the public and/or consumers of college sports advocating from the outside in. We theorize that fans will be less supportive of gender equity initiatives than the general public, given their investment in the product and the overwhelming media bias that places higher value on and coverage of men’s sports. We also predict those men who participated in formalized sports in high school will be more inured to gender inequalities and less supportive of aggressive change – a downstream socialization effect from participating in a sex-segregated system. We find strong support for our hypotheses, using a novel measure of fandom. We also find that parents with daughters who play sports express greater support for gender equity initiatives; however, this effect is dwarfed by the fandom and enduring high school sports dynamics. This shows barriers to change from the marketplace and the enduring impacts of sex-segregated institutions preventing change from the outside in.

This chapter explores the development of social provisioning as a matter not of right but of democratic administration in France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The authors take issue with conventional chronologies of rights development, which see civil and political rights being developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with social rights appearing in the twentieth. Such categories and sequencing obscure the ways in which democratic administrations took the problem of social provisioning seriously. A history of socio-economic rights cannot be distinguished from the less formal technologies of socio-economic regulation that were an integral part of the democratic question across the nineteenth century, and, in particular, the modernisation of regulatory governance. The democratisation of administrative powers precluded any sharp distinction among the political, the social and the economic. For better and for worse, this process took place through the building, rescaling and redefining of older, pre-democratic technologies of governance in response to what were perceived as pressing public problems.

The resource management complications posed by “Temporal Commons”– the common pool of time shared by present and future generations when making resource management decisions – are understudied in the literature. This chapter attempts to briefly describe their nature, before detailing how the typical solutions to the tragedy of the commons – private property, government regulation, and Elinor Ostrom’s successful collective action model – fail to adequately account for temporal commons. Next, the chapter explores some factors that distinguish temporal commons from traditionally studied commons, making them subject to a potentially more inevitable form of tragedy. The chapter concludes with initial thoughts on avenues for better addressing the dilemmas created by temporal commons.