**1. Introduction**

We live in a business civilization. What businesses do and how they operate extensively affect all areas of contemporary life both in industrialized societies and worldwide. Several contemporary trends are deeply disturbing – regarding climate change and other environmental concerns, the reduction in employment opportunities, and increasing inequality with regard to wealth. To a significant degree each of these problems grows out of the ways businesses have been operating. These problems have become more aggravated since the 1970s in spite of the noteworthy efforts by many businesses to address these concerns during this same period of time. Many businesses have committed themselves to foster social responsibility, environmentally sustainable practices, ethically informed conduct, and more responsible governance. These efforts have made a significant difference but the trends to which I have referred remain disturbing. Accordingly, while supporting these diverse efforts to foster socially and environmentally responsible business practices, it is time as well to undertake some fundamental re-thinking about underlying character and purposes of business enterprises. What is and what should be the business of businesses? Typically how are critical decisions made and how should they be made? These are vital questions because the disturbing trends with respect to the environment, the reduction of employment opportunities, and increased inequality in wealth seem to be closely connected with the current financial model regarding the character and purposes of business activity.

I will begin this project in "re-thinking" by analyzing these trends and the ways current businesses practices contribute to them. To begin with, we see around us evidence of considerable environmental damage directly and indirectly caused by how businesses operate. These include climate change, the pollution of both fresh and ocean waters, deforestation and soil degradation in many areas, and depletion at anxiety-provoking rates of a number of non-renewable minerals. Climate change has already occasioned increases in more destructive storms, droughts, forest fires, lands lost to rising sea levels, and the migrations of millions of people forced to leave where they had been living because of these conditions. Despite the commitment of many businesses to sustainability, these disturbing trends have continued. In the second place, many people worry as well about the ways current business practices have become associated with the disappearance of jobs, both because more goods and services are being produced by workers in other countries and because more and more tasks that used to be performed by laborers are now being performed, or will in the not too distant future be performed, by smart machines. In spite of contemporary lower rates of formal unemployment in some industrialized countries, rates of underemployment have markedly grown as have the rates of working age men and women who have simply dropped out of the labor force. A goodly portion of the reduction in full time employment has occurred not just as the results of technological changes and globalization but because of increasing use of temporary workers and the steady decrease in the share of business earnings devoted to paying for labor and the increasing portion devoted to paying investors. The rates of joblessness are likely to increase steadily in the future unless we act in some ways to address this issue. The consequence of these trends for family life, political processes, and community activities has been and are likely to continue to be very disturbing. Finally, although rates of extreme poverty have declined globally as have the rates of income inequality between countries, the rates in inequality in wealth have increased steadily over the past four decades. These rates of inequality have increased in part because low and middle income households have not appreciably gained in their wealth but even more because the wealthy have found more ways to enhance and protect their wealth. Businesses generally and businesses in the financial sector especially have contributed to these trends by creating more ways of accumulating and protecting financial wealth.
