“While stakeholder capitalism has been wildly successful in front-lining its rhetoric of a softer capitalism, it has ignored historic levels of corporate and financial concentration which leave stakeholders like workers, consumers, and independent businesses largely at the mercy of monopolists,” said Denise Hearn, Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project.
“Acknowledging corporate power would aid proponents of stakeholder capitalism, because it aligns with people’s everyday experience of disempowerment in monopolized capitalism,” said Michelle Meagher, co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project.
Indeed, as “Stakeholder Capitalism’s Next Frontier” details, there is an inherent link between the perpetual drive for scale and dominance, and the recurring market abuses of the largest corporations. Today’s markets are highly concentrated, and it is within this economic structure that stakeholder capitalists and ESG investors make their case for better corporate behavior. True stakeholder capitalists must wrestle with this reality, argue Hearn and Meagher.
To truly serve stakeholders, advocates must embrace an antimonopoly agenda, and reclaim and reassert the foundational tenets of a democratic economy: that corporations are fundamentally embedded within society, that the corporation is a public creation and should be publicly accountable, and that markets are public creations and structured by politically determined rules.
