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Show 36 Guinea, Nigeria, and Columbia to stabilize their economic interests in transnational contexts. Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America red-line neighborhoods to maximize returns on investments in New York, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, exacerbating racial tensions and socio-economic divides between economic classes. Corporations are powerful rhetorical actors that use networks to initiate waves of social and political change that affect the world in which we live. Although these particular cases may evoke moral outrage, it is necessary to resist this temptation and ask how corporations work. To do otherwise is itself to jeopardize a comprehensive understanding of how corporations function for a few fleeting moments of moral pleasure. Morality, after all, is the handmaiden of humanism. Even if this author were to play the game of morality, it could just as easily be demonstrated that corporations oftentimes facilitate "good," or "just" social change by pointing to various examples where corporations have been key to improving human health, protecting the environment, and providing economic opportunity for lowprivileged households. Corporations are still powerful social actors that are paramount to social change. In many cases corporations are vital agents of progressive social change. It is no wonder, then, that climate activists such as the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are networking with corporations such as Duke Energy and General Electric to mobilize social change. In fact, in 2009, six of the world's 15 largest public corporations supported advocacy for U.S. Cap and Trade policy (Nisbet, 2011). Even Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have occasionally partnered with corporations to promote environmental change (Barringer, 2012; Greenpeace, 2010; Webb 2005). It should thus be obvious that social change is an arbitrary term and that corporate |
