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Economic activity is typically provided by three distinct sectors. For-profit entities seek to maximize owner profit by providing various goods and services. The not-for-profit sector consists of private or quasi-public entities that provide goods and services without regard to making an explicit profit. Government entities extract resources from the economy and redistribute them to achieve certain public goods.

Recently a fourth or gray sector has developed that combines elements of the other three. As a corporate form that explicitly sacrifices profit maximization to advance some predetermined social good, benefit corporations are one example of this gray sector. Owners are aware of this dual mission but still invest as the social objectives are consistent with their personal goals. Thus, the benefit corporation can be viewed as a for-profit entity subject to an explicit social welfare constraint.

Since the late 1960s governments have spent trillions of dollars on a wide variety of social welfare programs. Nevertheless, poverty persists and government altruism may have made poverty more intractable in some respects. Economic logic suggests that providing social welfare transfer payments with few work or training requirements can make recipients dependent and enable dysfunctional behavior. Over time this may rob recipients of opportunities for labor and self-sufficiency.

Benefit corporations are typically viewed as a form of socially responsible investment that leverages the economic advantages of market-based systems. To date, however, little has been written about the benefit corporation’s potential ethical dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to provide a moral argument based in Catholic Social Teaching to support the use of benefit corporations as a substitute for some government service programs. Our arguments are centered on the primary principle of Human Dignity and will include, but not be limited to: Work, Solidarity and there role social and economic society as well as the Role of Government or Subsidiarity (including the Welfare State).

Man’s action at work is not a particular issue, nor does it separate him from his being or family life, but rather work helps man to develop and unifies each of his constitutive elements. Thus, the company must see man as a whole, as an end and not as a means, to achieve what the company must seek for society, that is, the common good, and, with it, the man’s objective good. This chapter aims to demonstrate a thorough, structured way of knowing, understanding and potentiating human faculties, virtues and passions in favor of a kind of leadership that focuses more on the human person. It is framed by business’s trend of social responsibility and its current impact. In this way, social responsibility takes on a different direction and inspires workers and companies’ real commitment to the good of society.

Social and environmental accounting research manifests varying levels of awareness of critical global problems and the need to develop alternative approaches to dealing with economy and society. This paper explores Buddhist thought and, specifically, Buddhist economics as a means to informing this debate. We draw on and expand Schumacher's ideas about ‘Buddhist economics’, first articulated in the 1960s. Our analysis centres on Buddhism's Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path and associated Buddhist teachings. The examination includes assumptions, means and ends of Buddhist approaches to economics; these are compared and contrasted with conventional economics.To consider how thought and practice may be bridged, we examine a practical application of Buddhism's Middle Way, in the form of Thailand's current work with ‘Sufficiency Economy’.Throughout the paper, we explore the implications for the development of social accounting, looking for mutual interactions between Buddhism and social accounting thought and practice.

This chapter is a reflection on the digital mediation of death and dying in the COVID-19 pandemic from a critical political economy perspective. It asks: What is the role of the communication of death and dying in capitalist society? How has communication with dying loved ones changed in the COVID-19 pandemic? What roles have digital technologies and capitalism played in this context?

Building on foundational theoretical insights into the role of death and dying in capitalism, this essay presents some empirical studies of death and dying in society and the COVID-19 pandemic and interprets their findings from a Communication Studies perspective.

In capitalist societies, death and dying are taboo topics and are hidden, invisible and institutionalised. The COVID-19 pandemic had contradictory effects on the role of death in society. It is a human, cultural and societal universal that humans want to die in company with loved ones. The presented empirical studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. The wish to die in a social manner derives from humans' social and communicative nature. In capitalism, the reality of dying diverges from the ideal of dying. Capitalism hides, individualises, makes invisible and institutionalises death and dying.

The analysed studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. Building and going beyond the works of the political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe and the philosopher and sociologist Erich Fromm, the essay introduces the notion of capitalist necropower. It is shown how the COVID-19 pandemic in many cases destroyed the social and communicative nature of human beings and how capitalist necropower created unnecessary surplus deaths and formed the context of the digital mediation of communication with dying loved ones in the pandemic.

Contemporary sociologists implicitly assume or explicitly state that classical social theorists shared the Enlightenment’s optimistic vision that society would become more rational, free, ethical, and just overtime. I reexamine the primary works that laid the foundation for sociology and resituate them in their neo-Romantic origins.

Close readings of formative texts are provided to revisit modernist critiques of social progress in turn of the century sociology. The works of Ferdinand Tönnies, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber exemplify this tradition.

Insights from social theory written during and around the neo-Romantic period mirrored the Zeitgeist, a time fascinated with irrationality, moral decay, unconsciousness, decadence, degeneration, cynicism, historical decline, and pessimism. However, classical sociology’s pessimism should not be interpreted as anti-modern. Rather, it contributed to the Enlightenment’s maturation.

Contemporary sociologists should recover the spirit of classical sociology’s gloomy extension of the modern project and bring societal processes to consciousness through human reason, untainted by the fable of progress. Without rational grounds for optimism, the most honest and sincere way to preserve the hope for alternatives and emancipation is through the continuation and advancement of the pessimistic tradition. To formulate new disillusioned theories of society, sociology ought to draw from its ignored tragic legacy.

Rather than accept accounts of classical sociologists as believers in progress, the tradition reveals a world of increasing disenchantment, atomization, anomie, alienation, confusion, quarrel, rationalization devoid of value, and unhappiness. Providing society thoughtful, systematic accounts of its own estrangement advances the project of modernity.

Cyrus the Great produced the first human rights declaration. Now two millennia later we have a lesser one, adapted through compromise. This leads to people suggesting that the world would be better if we were better people.

Game theorists have already given a disappointing answer to concern: The world would not be a better place if we were all better people! This chapter examines this answer in the context of business behaviour and ethics.

Ethical discussions show that the pursuit of maximum welfare can be considered to provide the basis for the capitalist systems and its reliance upon the market and individual endeavour.

The research is at a theoretical level and based upon games theory; it can therefore be extended.

It is our argument that ethics cannot be removed from any analysis of behaviour without disastrous consequences and this is a flaw with the game. And consequently a flaw with societal behaviour which has been so legitimated: both need changing. This requires a new form of analysis within games theory predicated in a new definition of utility.

This develops our understanding of ethical behaviour within organisations through a novel mode of analysis.