Barbara Fryzel is an economist and Associate Professor of Management at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is a laureate of the Foundation for Polish Science for the postdoc fellowship at the University College London as well as a management practitioner with business development and corporate advisory experience in multinational firms. Her research interests cover corporate social responsibility, behavioural ethics, and organizational culture.
The book aims at developing a new analytical as well as historical framework for understanding and enhancing our corporate civilization. Barbara sets out her vision of moral behaviour and discusses the changes needed to using business as a force for good. Managers need to embrace a sense of purpose beyond making profits and to find new business opportunities to meet society's needs. The emerging proposal advocated by the Author is to favour the transition from Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Civil Responsibility. Companies, in fact, are not purely private associations, rather they are little governments created by the State legislation to advance public ends. Barbara provides corporate executives clear evidence that taking ethics not just as a constraint to their behaviour, but as an argument of their objective function constitutes the surest path to success, especially in such turbulent times as the present ones. This is a book for the realist with conscience. - Stefano Zamagni, Professor of economics,University of Bologna and SAIS Europe, Johns Hopkins University