David Korten

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David C. Korten (1937– ) is an American author, political activist and prominent critic of corporate globalization, "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems".[1] His best-known publication is When Corporations Rule the World (1995 and 2001).

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[edit] Early life and career

David Korten was born in Longview, Washington in 1937 and is a 1955 graduate of Longview's R. A. Long high school. He received a Master of Business Administration and PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He says: "My early career [after leaving Stanford in 1959] was devoted to setting up business schools in low-income countries - starting with Ethiopia". He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force, undertaking US-based teaching and organisational duties;[1] and for 5½ years was a visiting professor in the Harvard Business School. While at Stanford in the 1950s, he married Frances Fisher Korten, with whom he now lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington.

[edit] Career and main body of work

He served as the Harvard Business School adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Institute of Business Administration. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family-planning programs.

In the late 1970s, Korten moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly 15 years, serving as a Ford Foundation project specialist and, later, as Asia regional advisor on development management to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which involved him in regular travel between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.[1]

Korten says he became disenchanted with the official aid system and devoted his last five years in Asia to "working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change".[1] He formed the view that the poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world, including the United States and other "developed" countries. He also concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis.

He returned to the US in 1992 and has assisted in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and environmental protection.

Korten is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network which publishes the quarterly YES! Magazine. He is also a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.[2], and a member of the Club of Rome.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda (1990)
  • When Corporations Rule the World (1995 / Second Edition 2001)
  • The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism
  • Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power
  • The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Berrett-Koehler. 2006-04-28. ISBN 1-887208-07-0. 
  • Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth 2009 Berrett-Koehler ISBN 9781605092898
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[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d Biography on self-promotional website.
  2. ^ International Forum on Globalization

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten"