By Tom Lloyd
Visiting Fellow to Northampton Business School
The launch of Northampton University Business School’s ‘Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance’(CCEG) has been inspired in part by the conviction that there is an urgent need, particularly in the West, for a new contract between business, individuals, and society at large.
We have reached the end of an era - a fin de siècle. The financial
and economic traumas of recent years have been a wake up call. The post-war
liberal capitalist consensus has been undermined by the manifest incompetence
of those to whom ordinary people have relied on hitherto for economic,
financial, and corporate governance, and by the huge rewards those same
incompetents have appropriated, and continue to appropriate.
The value-creating power of business consists of people and
people everywhere are rejecting a vision of business in which the company is
merely an engine for creating shareholder value.
It will take a lot of time and thought to reach a consensus
on the new contract. It is a challenge comparable in scale and radicalism to
the great 18th century enlightenment that replaced the medieval era of
all-powerful monarchs and their ‘divine rights’, with a new secular age of science and reason.
The design and specification of this new contract is a job
for the heirs of the enlightenment philosophers (Newton, Leibniz, Spinoza,
Smith, Descartes, Voltaire, Locke, Diderot, Montesquieu, Franklin, Jefferson
and Paine). The CCEG is committed to and wants to play a part in this hugely
important enterprise.
Quite what form the ‘new contract’ will take is not yet
clear, but it is certain to emerge from interactions between the CCEG’s three
themes; Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance.
The mission of this blog is to apply new enlightenment
thinking to the political, social, economic and corporate topics and issues of
the day, to identify and criticise pre-enlightenment thinking, and to challenge
traditional assumptions and conventional wisdoms.
We welcome feedback, the more the better, and we will offer
‘guest slots’ to those who have strong views about what we write here and
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