When corporations engage in misconduct, we rely on two types of sanctions to discipline them: legal and reputational. For various reasons, both types of sanctions have limitations. This chapter argues that a combination of legal and reputational sanctions for corporate misconduct can help to improve the effectiveness of blame attribution, deliver meaningful punishment for misconduct, and foster organizational change. For example, legal sanctions through lawsuits and government fines can trigger reputational sanctions that can unleash a subsequent wave of monetary costs because the publicity associated with the lawsuit or government fine can lead a corporation’s stakeholders to re-evaluate their relationship with it. Alternatively, legal rules can facilitate the operation of reputational markets by increasing information flows and thereby improving attribution of conduct to particular companies.

Rhetoric is of paramount importance when facing an issue that requires a reformation of public sentiment. Such an issue is the struggle for the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. This section consists of six speeches that address this issue. The speakers include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcom X.

Environmental groups are important stakeholders because they strengthen the collective voice of their constituents and because they can enhance company value, such as with environmental partnerships, and harm company value, such as with activist campaigns and boycotts. An effective environmental strategy needs to be tailored for environmental group stakeholders and reflect their own strategic needs. Environmental groups compete to provide collective goods and need their own advantage in acquiring supportive stakeholders. An important challenge in responding to activist campaigns is assessing the campaign’s strengths and negotiating terms for a solution that preserves company values. The case of Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz’s response to a Greenpeace campaign against his company illustrates the information and negotiation challenges in many activist campaigns. Environmental partnerships, in contrast, are an opportunity for a company and its environmental group partner to produce triple bottom line outcomes. Important keys to success are finding synergies in the resources that partners contribute and assuring that each side will follow through on its commitments.

This unpublished essay of 1946 examines the West African cocoa industry as a case study of the attempt by African agricultural producers to resist exploitation by European capital. On the Gold Coast, native farmers developed robust cocoa production without European investment or other assistance; if they were white, they would soon have become a prosperous community of independent peasant farmers, begun processing raw material, and eventually achieved Dominion political status. Because they were Black they faced unhindered exploitation, refusals to give them voice in industry or the state, and ignorance and betrayal on the part of British officials. Merchant cartels monopolized the market and suppressed the price paid for raw cocoa, farmers were prevented from hedging against fluctuations on the world market by storing their crop, and they were driven into ruinous loans by moneylenders. The farmers’ early success in boycotting the cocoa market was disrupted by the advent of World War II, when the British government established a government monopoly and fixed cocoa prices. The cocoa farmers’ self-organization should be recognized as a model for the emancipation of colonial populations.

This chapter explores the intended and unintended actions of rural people and their allies during the War on Poverty who significantly pushed an alternative image of family farm environmental politics onto the urban table of public concern by the 1980s. Farmworker co-ops and consumer-focused activism in the mid-1960s prefigured these consumer-based and child-focused strategies of food activism of the 1980s. War on Poverty organizing in the West and the farmworker movement previewed the powerful potential combination of producer and consumer politics that helped to remake the image of the family farm in the minds of consumers. The emerging image linked everyday choices about food to the broader social and environmental contexts in which children’s health was always paramount. This chapter emphasizes the parallel and connected story of counterculture or alternative agriculture activism of the 1970s and 1980s as well, a movement that emerged to fill the vacuum of trust in industrial agriculture and that saw great successes in bridging the gap between urban consumers and rural producers around concerns for small-scale, local, and pesticide-free foods. But the question was always, Whose children?

Chapter 1 explains a natural law understanding of cooperation with evil, uses it to develop an understanding of consumer boycotts, and applies this understanding to the question: What kinds of choices are appropriate with respect to the boycott of the meat industry proposed by vegetarians, vegans, and others? The chapter pays particular attention to the so-called threshold argument against consumer meat purchases.