Book Reviews of GREED, INC.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happen

Praise for Greed, Inc.:

“…insightful and helpful”
Globe and Mail

“Rowland sheds light on the growth — and the menace — of the profit-driven modern large corporation”
Winnipeg Free Press

“freshness of quality journalism and the confidence of careful reflection… Rowland here combines broad research, impressive intellectuality and… enviable clarity”
National Post

“…intruiging… Rowland has an interesting perspective, a smooth, thoughtful writing style and smarts”
Chris DeVito, CD Syndicated (radio stations: CJSF, CiTR, CO-OP, CJAM)

“a wise book by a thinker and writer of great good sense and clarity”
Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

“That’s one of the intriguing angles from which Rowland looks at them. More disturbingly, he also concludes that corporate employees who perform unethical acts for business reasons cannot, in the end, hold to their own ethical cores.”
– Maclean’s

“Timely and important. No anti-capitalistic rant, Greed, Inc. is a wise book by a thinker and writer of great good sense and clarity. Wade Rowland shows how we have allowed the giant corporation to run amok amongst us, and offers ways to tame the beat and re-hitch it to the public good. All who are worried about the mounting damage done to society and nature in the name of profit should read Greed, Inc. without delay.”
– Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

“Rowland offers an excursus on the moral failings of the modern business corporation. He is insightful and helpful in unpacking the problem of why good (or at least ordinary) people do bad things in their corporate lives.”
– Globe and Mail newspaper

“As a former editor at Adbusters Magazine, an employee at a large corporation and a missionary at this fine “alternative” radio station I believe I’m perfectly suited to stand on my soapbox on the street corner thumping my copy of this book and yelling that I have seen the light.

Naiomi Klein’s “No Logo” was the faux hip view of corporate seduction, Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” as arid and fanatical as Bin Laden broadcasting from his cave. Where Rowland comes in is with an intriguing “moral philosophy” of sorts which ultimately reads like the corporation is your pathologically lying, cheating, and stealing friend.

Yes, elements of the book do sound familiar (especially after the movie “The Corporation”) and some do not (the book’s final chapter is especially evocative) and, no, the irony of a book about corporations published through a corporation isn’t lost on me. But Rowland has an interesting perspective, a smooth, thoughtful writing style and smarts. This is the book–entertaining and academic–that you’ll quote in your midterm papers.”
– Chris DeVito, CD Syndicated (radio stations: CJSF, CiTR, CO-OP, CJAM)

“a thoroughly readable historical look at the roots of the modern corporation”
– Mathew Beherens, Quill and Quire

“Claiming the modern business corporation is “an alien life form” may seem like a bit of a stretch. Yet Ontario writer and professor Wade Rowland makes an interesting case, as he probes both history and the recent behaviour of well-known companies to try explaining the triumph of greed in our world.

His thesis is that the modern corporation is a kind of pathological creature that overtakes the behaviour of its employees, even the CEO. Otherwise, how could people behave so decently as private citizens and so ruthlessly as business managers?

Rowland has respectable credentials for exposing corporate behaviour. He is a longtime student of, and lecturer on, ethics. He has written about environmental issues. As a journalist he once worked for the Winnipeg Free Press. For a time he served, with a television network, as a corporate executive.”
– Ron Kirbyson, Winnipeg Free Press