Details Purpose: To make a comparison and evaluation of two of the major theories of corporate orientation and obligation Instructions: Start by reading chapters 4 and 5 of the Scalet text. Then, ask yourself what purpose or purposes should corporations serve in society? Should management be focused primarily on benefiting shareholders (also called stockholders), with benefits to society created only indirectly through shareholder wealth? Or should managers owe duties to a broad range of stakeholders, which would include shareholders but also employees, customers, suppliers, lenders, communities, and the environment? In this second perspective, the benefits to shareholders would occur indirectly through the diverse and distributed benefits that accrue to societal stakeholders. This is a simple question with no easy answer: who gets to make the first and most significant claim on the corporation--shareholders or stakeholders? The reason this question is hard to answer definitively is that there are so many well-argued, disagreeing views. In 1970, economist Milton Friedman famously stated that management should focus solely on benefiting shareholders; if shareholders then want to benefit society, they are free to do so with their own funds, but corporate should not be used for non-shareholder purposes. Decades later, a different view arose. Management scholar Edward Freeman argued that corporations owe duties to many different stakeholders and that they should balance these duties to reach the greatest good for all (essentially a utilitarian argument). The debate raged for nearly fifty years, and in 2019 Business Roundtable--an organization made up of some of the world's most powerful CEOs--released a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation , essentially adopting Freeman's stakeholder approach. Or...perhaps not. There is much disagreement about the effect of the Business Roundtable CEOs' statements. Did they reorient their own companies to look away from shareholders only and towards all affected stakeholders? Or did they merely use the rhetoric of stakeholder theory as a way to burnish their public image, all with an eye towards primarily benefiting shareholders? Only time will tell whether these companies actually make any meaningful strategic changes. The implications for society and the environment are enormous. If corporations have stakeholder duties to society, then they have some obligation to engage in activities that mitigate big problems like climate change or income inequality. But if the shareholder theorists (like Friedman) are right, then macro-level concerns like climate change, income inequality, racial prejudice, disease, and malnutrition, etc. should be addressed by governments and individuals, and not corporations. Who is right? Assignment: In this assignment, you have the opportunity to take a well-thought-out position on the shareholder/stakeholder debate. Write a 3-4 page APA formatted position paper, wherein you compare and contrast the two positions, with an evaluation of each. Then, take a position on which position is better for society. You will need to carefully do additional reading beyond what is assigned in the Scalet and Cheeseman texts in order to fairly describe and evaluate the two positions. You might make reference to the Week 1 ethical framework assignment, presuming it supports your assessment here in Week 5. Click the "Submit Assignment" link in the upper right corner to upload your assignment