Freeman presents ideas that are forthcoming in Freeman, Harrison and Wicks, “Managing for Stakeholders”, which will be published in 2007. His core proposition is “Business is all about value creation and trade”. In his opinion, “capitalism” refers to a number of different debates in society: Often the term is confusing and opaque. He’s stating that, if we think about how a society can sustain a system of voluntary value creation and trade, then capitalism can be beneficial. And he highlights traditional models of capitalism, portraying markets as the main metaphor for most models of business. However, what does it help a business, to think about creating value in trade, he asks. And: What does the entrepreneur do?
Economies work in part, “because there always is a better way to start”. However, the problems with competition are captured by four arguments: the global, historical, societal framework, and the human nature argument. Historical: Value creation and trade has emerged in a time *before* the nation state. The traditional idea is that capitalism works because people compete with each other - and that entrepreneurship must relate to the concept of a singular, egotistical entrepreneur. Freeman thinks this is wrong.
Following up on this, he remarks: How can we have an ethical theory separated from business, if we always have been value creators and traders? The overall internalised presumption is that business is morally questionable - without realising the benefits of business. And thus, businessmen are mostly interested to answer the question “what do you stand for” rather than “what business are you in”.
To Freeman, capitalism is a system of social cooperation. It is about how to create value for each other - something that no-one does on their own. And exactly this is, why capitalism works. We have simply forgotten that business works because we can work together and because we have joint interests. He calls this “stakeholder co-operation”.
In addition to this, “stakeholder responsibility” is needed to create, trade and sustain value: parties agree that they accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. When third parties are harmed, they must be compensated, or a new agreement must be negotiated with all of those parties who are affected.
Value can be created, traded and sustained because human beings are complex psychological creations, capable of acting from many different values and points of view. Economists ignore a lot of what we already know about human behaviour. They talk about “rewards and punishments” and ignore that human beings have complex emotional lifes. Freeman states: this exactly, this complexity is the reasons why business works. That’s where capitalism starts. And this is stakeholder engagement, adding to stakeholder responsibility and stakeholder co-operation. So, according to Freeman, the classical and scholarly debate between Freeman and Friedman is “beside the point”:
“Stakeholder engagement is the essence of what business is all about.”
Update: Freeman’s keynote.