The Road to Co-Operation―Escaping the Bottom Line

This critical and informed protest against the absurdity and dishonesty of neoclassical economic theory as it has progressed through the 20th century down to the present, sheds new light on the predicament faced in 2012. In The Road to Co-operation , Pearson highlights the dangers of using unrealistic mathematical models of human, organisational and market behaviour to guide policy prescriptions. He shows the damage done to real economies, markets, firms and people, by the unwarranted trust in unregulated markets, proclaimed by Friedman and colleagues, promulgated by academia and adopted by the financial-political-corporate nexus, now dominant in Anglo-American jurisdictions. Though real markets work better than known alternatives, Pearson makes the crucial distinction between the real and the speculative-financial, where totally different realities apply. Failure to make that distinction has transformed financial sectors from supportive of the real economy, to exploitative and sometimes fraudulent. Pearson provides a comparative analysis of corporate governance theory, law, and practice in different jurisdictions, including the self-destruction of post-mature Anglo-American governance with the more robust custom and practice in the industrial economies of Germany and Japan and emerging economies of China and India, which all exercise care for their real economic strengths and provide object lessons for governance in UK and US. The Road to Co-operation proposes realistic changes in policy and practice, in the context of sustainability, which would be prerequisite to recapturing real long term economic success on a co-operative and non-exploitative foundation. It will be invaluable for today's business faculty, students and practitioners as well as the 'madmen in authority'.

With a long industrial and academic experience, Gordon Pearson has carved out a distinctive position focusing on the impacts of economic and behavioural theory on the practical realities of business management. His practitioner experience in manufacturing extended to general and strategic management. His PhD focused on innovation and identified strategy and culture as critical. This is his seventh book and follows The Rise and Fall of Management, also published by Gower in 2009. Read his blog at www.gordonpearson.co.uk