In America today, CEO pay is at an all-time high and the disparities between rich and poor have never been greater—but business culture also includes corporate social responsibility (CSR) and investment strategies that reduce harm to people and the planet (ESG). Given these contrasts, we need to ask: How genuine are these commitments, and what evidence do we have that the application of such principles will lead to a more just, sustainable, and equitable future? What are the origins of these approaches to business, and how have past experiments fared?

The late Herbert Gutman is remembered for his attention to laboring classes in the United States, especially African Americans, who created a culture of workers that endured and challenged the vagaries of capitalism. Less remembered is his advice to mind the motivations and culture of the owning class that imposed an order and ideology on the laborers whom Gutman most cared about. Gutman studied “industrial laissez-faire”—the belief that the economy, and therefore society, are better off when owners are unfettered by regulation—to understand the perverse logics of industrialists and explain how workers might level the playing field by knowing the management philosophy of their employers. For him the “pre-Gilded Age Protestantism” practiced by the “Acquisitive Man” of the 19^th century revealed exploitative assumptions and practices that compelled workers to mobilize. In Work, Culture, and Society, Gutman shows how the “culture-bound” Christianity of industrialists sometimes “pacified the poor” but just as often infuriated the working class and inspired employees to challenge employer’s authority.

The historians on this panel carry on in Gutman’s tradition, embracing projects that explore the lives and logic of CEOs from a “bottom up” perspective, and interrogate the structures of power that tilt in favor of the rich but create the potential for worker rebellion. In some cases, these historians have explored the history of business leaders who do not perfectly fit the mold of Gutman’s “Acquisitive Man” by their identity as an immigrant or person of color; by their embrace of unions and union leaders in the management of their companies; or in their belief that they might improve (or “heal”) the world through their business practices. In each case, the figures explored are business leaders whose legacies complicate the rapacious image of the heartless CEO.