| | Crime dominates the mass media. Fiction is about conflict or at least challenge. Biographies are interesiting only because of achievements, rather than lives of gentle ease and assured comfort. So, we thrive on stories of conflict. The problem is the "mass mediated hyper-reality of crime."
The CSI franchise, the Law & Order franchise, the NCIS franchise (will there be a new show, NCIS: Port to Port?), these are businesses that sell fiction as closely related to criminology as Star Trek is to physics.
Corporate executives do not kill each other - in real life, deaths come from corporate irresponsibility and the victims are anonymous and many.
Eastern Michigan University professor of criminology Gregg Barak is responsible for several innovations in the sociology of crime. Most recently, he and his collaborators, Prof. Young S. Kim, and Hon. Donald E. Shelton, published a series of papers on the "CSI Effect" (summary here.). Among Dr. Barak's other investigations is "newsmaking criminology" the relationship between the mass media and the reality of crime.
Jules is correct when he suggested, " ... that employers and their union employees need to conduct negotiations in a non adversarial atmosphere." (Though as Prof. Machan notes, above that, thinking is petrified.) I have recommended here on RoR a book brought to our state numismatic convention Educational Forum by a lawyer from Heritage Auctions, Getting to Yes. The first thing is not to sit on opposite sides of the table, but on the same side.
For a paper in a Social Problems class (linked here), I wrote about Objectivist ethics as applied to business. I found these papers to have been useful. They were the Objectivist side of a multifaceted debate on business ethics.
- Locke, Edwin A., “Reviewed Work(s):A Review of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand,” The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Jan., 1989), pp. 100-103.
- Becker, Thomas E., “Integrity in Organizations: Beyond Honesty and Conscientiousness,” The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Jan., 1998), pp. 154-161.
- Locke, Edwin A., and Thomas E. Becker, “Rebuttal to a Subjectivist Critique of an Objectivist Approach to Integrity in Organizations,” The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Jan., 1998), pp. 170-175.
- Locke, Edwin A., and Thomas E. Becker, “Locke and Becker's Reply to Weiss,” The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 3. (Jul., 1998), pp. 391-392.
- Locke, Edwin A., and Thomas E. Becker, “Objectivism's Answer to the Sad, Old World of Subjectivism,” The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 23, No. 4. (Oct., 1998), pp. 658-659.
Broadly, it is easy to claim that Objectivism is being understood and taught, though, of course, the old fallacies still dominate.
Ayn Rand's works sowed many fields. Further evidence of that influence can be seen in the success of Deirdre McCloskey's studies on bourgeois morality. However, as the mass media and mass entertainment are by definition directed at the most common buyers, we must wait for them to catch up.
This is, of course, a known problem, as outlined in von Mises's Anti-Capitalist Mentality. The intellectuals complain that murder mysteries sell better than their books - they distrust of the open market. At the same time, those murder mysteries portray the upper classes as morally bankrupt.
The paradox of capitalism is selling the rope that will hang you, though we do like to think of the immense profits from unlicensed intellectual property in the form of Che Guevara T-Shirts. Von Mises was referring to Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The Law and Order junk was 50 years in the future.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 12/09, 7:06am)
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