ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to put the challenge of corporate stewardship in broader historical perspective and, in doing so, to call attention to the daunting nature of this challenge. Notwithstanding laudable efforts by some corporate leaders such as those discussed in several chapters of this volume, effective stewardship of social and natural resources is, I argue, impossible so long as our economy is based on market competition. Moreover, as social and environmental degradation accelerates, the illusion that we can engender genuine stewardship in a market-based economy becomes increasingly dangerous. To make effective stewardship a reality across a wide enough swath of enterprises, we will need to remake fundamentally our society so that economic decisions are no longer driven by market competition but instead by collective deliberation.
