The prostitution of talent

Corporations will always behave like corporations no matter how ethical or creative their staffs become

By Matt Hogan 

As a student I’ve heard lots of hopeful rhetoric about the dawning of the Age of Enlightened Corporations, where businesses and other groups will hire less narrowly-educated experts and more “well-rounded” “creative thinkers” with liberal arts degrees who can “problem solve” and deal with “ethical issues.” The bottom-line is to be supplemented with imaginative and moral considerations, supposedly to infuse the corporate sector with long-term strategies for sustainable, just practices.

Of course good education makes for better thinkers. But should we be propping up corporations with our intellectual energy? Shouldn’t we be weakening the corporatist stronghold on society, instead of strengthening it? The Economist newspaper detailed the corporate competition for talent (“The Battle for Brainpower”, Oct 5th 2006) and, as usual, it avoided raising any ethical questions like the one above, which is ironic, since ethics is said to be big business nowadays. The Economist reported that “intangible assets” (that is, intellectual talent) “have shot up from 20% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 in 1980 to around 70% today.” Talent-intensive positions are also the fastest growing type of employment, making up some 40% of the American labour market and accounting for 70% of the jobs created since 1998. And in this age of globalization, “the same sort of thing is bound to happen in developing countries as they get richer,” it reports. “Even governments have got the talent bug,” it added.

Google, according to The Economist, “has assembled a formidable hiring machine to help it find the people it needs” and has “experimented with clever new recruiting tools, such as billboards featuring complicated mathematical problems.” Meanwhile, Google’s competitor Yahoo! “has hired a constellation of academic stars.”

Will these stars help these companies, or will genuine creativity and ethical input impede a business from turning a bigger profit? Similarly, are academics intellectually compromised by serving corporations?

Under the existing system of “voluntary restraint,” corporations are simply not capable of acting in sync with general public’s welfare. Corporatism and democracy are ideologically and historically opposed, even if neo-liberal voices like The Economist and Thomas Friedman buy into the intellectual myths that capitalism and democracy are natural bedfellows or that capitalism gave birth to modern democracy.

An age old problem

Selling one’s educated mind and natural abilities to the highest bidder is prostitution of talent. But this isn’t a new problem. Twenty-five hundred years ago Socrates, that model democratic citizen (doubtful, critical, articulate), called his rivals, the sophists—the wandering teachers who sold rhetoric and expertise to the greedy and politically ambitious—“prostitutes of wisdom.” In 1989 David Suzuki penned an essay on how corporate ties with academic fields jeopardizes the intellectual independence of universities. He called it “The Prostitution of Academia.”

Suzuki pointed out the inherent conflict between university and industry when it comes to “talent”: “Private companies encourage a destructive kind of competitiveness that can be petty and mean. Secrecy becomes a priority when patenting ideas is a primary goal. And the lure of profit . . . ignores the broader questions of social responsibility and impact.” Both Socrates and Suzuki were saying that knowledge is not inherently good: it can be used for good or bad, and that the difference is a choice of the individual.

The Faustian bargain

When we think of selling one’s talent to the Devil it’s usually artistic talent. The superb Nazi propaganda of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl comes to mind. Today Stephen Spielberg (no lover of Nazis) is apparently unaware of the irony in lending his cinematic talent as an "artistic advisor" to the design of the 2008 Olympics in China, a country with near-genocidal human rights violations, including the child-labour-produced Olympic merchandise recently discovered by the IOC. In an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, Mia Farrow suggested Spielberg was "the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games."

China is hailed as an emerging globalization superpower, and its business practices, we all know, are anything but ethical. But no economist will criticize China (or India, that other growing global business juggernaut) for polluting or exploiting child labour because, of course, they must focus on their economic prosperity. Forget about forging internationally-binding laws to combat climate change and environmental decay, business comes first! Both China and India have undoubtedly snatched up lots of “talent” to help them along.

Here’s the closest The Economist gets to making a value judgment on the corporate battle for talent: “[W]hat if a free market [raises] all sorts of political problems [such as] talented Western workers [having] to compete with millions of clever Indians who are willing to do the job for a small fraction of the price?” Not only are they betraying their favouritism towards the West, they appeal, as usual, to the God of the Free Market for guidance. What It says, goes. No room for ethics. As with any corporate battle, it’s sink or swim, even if all the water is fast drying up.

The wrong system

We live in a corporatist society with near-dead leanings toward participatory democracy. The policy of “voluntary restraint,” when it comes to corporations, with or without creative and ethical “intellectual talent,” is like letting the inmates run the asylum. Businesses will still be locked in a race to the bottom with other self-serving businesses, only with bigger brains to guide and disguise their destructive impulses. Conversely, since a legal responsibility of a business is to maximize profits, doing ethical business will always be a self-defeating disadvantage. Creativity and corporatism is a simple non-sequitur; ethical business, an oxymoron. At best corporatism is a necessary evil—something to subdue, not encourage, just like our personal greed. Joel Bakan, UBC law professor, was absolutely right in arguing that the business corporation is a sociopath since it operates to a logical yet absurd extreme on just one human trait—greed, our least human characteristic—and with nothing to balance it. So would we equip a sociopath with “talent”? To help them justify their actions? To “ethicise” their behaviour? No, we lock them up, or otherwise render them harmless to society and themselves. And so with corporations we should regulate, de-privatize, and regain control of the asylum, but not because corporations are inherently evil. Like the sociopath, they’re neither moral nor immoral because they lack a sense of ethics altogether: they are amoral. What is immoral is the choice to sell one’s talent to them.

“Educated” employees and hired “talent” won’t be revolutionizing corporate behaviour anytime soon. The profit motive and corporate loyalty would constantly cancel out anything ethical such as releasing vital information to the public or paying for externalities like pollution. The more ethical or long-term or inclusive a company gets in its practices (not just in its public rhetoric), the more democratic it gets, and the less like a corporation it is.

So why not just take the logic all the way and demolish the mechanisms by which corporations wield power over the democratic process? That is, why not regulate them? The only worthwhile ethical advice “talent” can offer a corporation is to stop acting like a corporation and start getting in line with the public good. To give any other advice would be to prostitute that talent. In the end, there will be no Enlightened Corporations. Good corporate citizenship means no corporate citizenship.