Conjuring-Up a Bad Guy: The Academy’s Straw-Manning of Milton Friedman’s Perspective of Corporate Social Responsibility and its Consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the idea that business stewards have a broader range of societal obligations than maximizing shareholder value, is a mainstream theme in contemporary management research, education, and practice. Carroll points to one of its controversial aspects when he describes a clash between management scholars (who are generally pro-CSR) and their neoclassical economic contrarians. This has become an increasingly one-sided conflict with the pro-CSR side prevailing in both business and academia. CSR proponents have generally viewed Milton Friedman as an opponent of CSR. However, we argue that Friedman’s purported opposition to CSR is something of a caricature. We reveal that Friedman was concerned that his advocacy for free market operation would promote pro-social outcomes. Indeed, through his emphasis on creating value for consumers, being good stewards of scarce resources, and avoiding rent-seeking’s inefficiencies, Friedman has more in common with CSR proponents than is sometimes acknowledged.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".