The Twilight of Corporate Strategy A Comparative Ethical Critique

There have been many books written about how to apply the concept of corporate strategy, yet few discuss the meaningfulness of the applications involved. Until now, not a single book has been written about the reasons people give to justify their study and advocacy of corporate strategy as a method of talking about the modern corporation. Taking a cue from the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilbert argues in The Twilight of Corporate Strategy that those who study corporate strategy can begin to justify their efforts once they take the very meaning of corporate strategy to be an open, ethical question. Gilbert creates a Nietzschean analysis in which he places the idea of corporate strategy in the "twilight" between the "daylight" of continued usage and the "darkness" of irrelevance for humans. This unique analysis is based on an exploration of the corporate strategy concept in an ethical twilight. Gilbert reinterprets the dominant contemporary approach, which he calls "strategy through process", as an ethical commentary on modern corporations. Gilbert goes on to create a contractarian ethical rendition of strategy, which he calls "strategy and justice". Through the use of a comparative critical argument, he demonstrates what he believes to be sound reasons for abandoning more traditional approaches to corporate strategy and for reconstructing it in accordance with "strategy and justice". He concludes that such attempts at advancement will provide hope that the corporation can be interpreted as a context in which humans can flourish, even as the dominant use of that concept often denies such hope.