James A. Joseph is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke University. Joseph served as the United States Ambassador to South Africa from 1996 to 2000, and as the Under Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior from 1977 to 1981. He was the President and CEO of the Council on Foundations, Vice President of the Cummins Engine Company, and served as Chaplain of the Claremont Colleges. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Order of Good Hope, South Africa’s highest award to a citizen of a foreign country. Joseph is also the author of
Cummins Engine Company: Capitalism with an Ethic
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Published:August 2015
The 1970s and 1980s were a time of trying to apply moral reasoning to the activities of business and government. This chapter is about capitalism with an ethic, the opportunity to work with Cummins Engine Company and its chairman J. Irwin Miller, who was described by Martin Luther King Jr. as the most progressive businessman in the United States. Miller had been a leader in the efforts to pass civil rights legislation and was widely respected for the philanthropy of both his company and his family, but when his successor, Henry Schacht, decided to formalize the values of the founding family, the author was recruited from his work in philanthropy to ensure that corporate ethics at Cummins included both the hard and the soft stuff of the worldwide business. It was a new platform to continue the work that began in Tuscaloosa and continued in Claremont.
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