Includes glossary, bibliographical references and indexes.

"At no moment in the entire twentieth century has it been more obvious that business operates within a complex web of social relationships. These broad societal networks now extend throughout the world. It is literally true that nowhere in the world can business go forward-nor can any business decision be made-without encountering human, social, political governmental, legal and ethical linkages. This awesome realization, while known earlier, has received greatly increased attention within the last half of the twentieth century. A sophisticated knowledge of the social environment now shapes managers' careers. It helps to guide corporate strategy. It defines many of business's central problems and frequently provides helpful solutions to them.

The last decade of the twentieth century is witnessing an immense transformation of business systems everywhere-from tightly regulated markets to freer markets, from centralized authoritarian controls to more horizontal systems, from a monopoly of decision making by a few to more widespread participation by widening circles of employees, from labor-intensive companies to greater reliance on computerized work processes, from isolated domestic markets to worldwide ones, from a narrow technical concept of business to one in which people and their communities demand a voice.

This enormously complex, continuously evolving and tightly interlinked business-and-society system is the subject of this book. This book, now in its seventh edition, has a long and widely respected record. The first edition of Business and Society, written by Keith Davis and Robert L. Blomstrom, won a national book award in 1966. The book's successive editions have been an authoritative repository of the major research findings of scholars who have studied business and society relations, as well as the thoughts and actions of business practitioners who have struggled both successfully and unsuccessfully with these kinds of problems."

English.