Extract from
Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz )
(Translation by the author)
Executives who publicly announce their intention to balance profits with social responsibility sometimes run the risk of being demonized (Tricks 2023). Larry Fink, the CEO of investment bank Black Rock, who began speaking out about the global crises in 2016 and announced that he would adapt Black Rock's business model to the ESG goals of environmental, social and governance (Fink 2016), has since come under fire from parliamentary and civil society actors. Surprisingly, this is happening from both sides in the USA, for many Republican parliamentarians and their supporters because it goes too far and for some Democrats because it does not go far enough.
In February 2016, following the Paris climate agreement in December 2015, Larry Fink announced in his annual letter to shareholders that he would no longer invest in fossil fuel business models. The treasurers of nineteen Republican-governed US states then announced that they were planning to withdraw state funds from Black Rock due to Fink's "aggressive commitment to so-called ESG investments" (Moynihan 2022). In a television interview, Republican Senator Ted Cruz even accused Fink of placing an additional burden on US citizens through his aggressive investment strategy following the rise in fossil fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine. Cruz called this the "Larry Fink surcharge". "There's a Larry Fink surcharge: every time you fill up, you can thank Larry for massive and inappropriate ESG pressure." (Cruz 2022)
When managers take on political responsibility and the investment firm Black Rock manages assets worth over 10 trillion dollars, there are good reasons to enter the political arena in the face of current crises. If the division of responsibilities between politicians and entrepreneurs becomes ambiguous and parliamentary democracy is limited in its ability to act in global crises such as climate change and solutions are often protracted, companies must also come out of the woodwork. This leads to a process of redistribution of legitimacy and representation claims between politics, business and civil society.
According to sociologist Dirk Baecker, this leads to a
"a kind of discourse of freely floating vocabulary, which is moved around in a public, a semi-public, in a naturally also concealed public of the back rooms, so to speak, in order to test who is actually prepared to do what, which topics actually need to be regulated, who would agree with me, who would reject me. [...] It is rather a kind of, yes, self-thematization of society, which becomes clear in an undefined addressee space about what kind of order it wants and what kind of order it does not want." (Baecker 2017)
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