Impact Studios

Prosperity Shared

A Management , Business and Education podcast

#30 in Management · 🇦🇺 #64 in Management · 🇧🇷

About the show

Prosperity Shared, is a new podcast from the Ultimo Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. Hosted by Carl Rhodes, Professor of Business and Society and Director of the Ultimo Institute. Across this series, he speaks with leading thinkers and writers from Australia and around the world about the economic, political and cultural forces shaping our lives. He explores corporate power and inequality, but also work, class, media and the stories we tell about care, success, suffering and freedom. At the heart of the series is a simple question: Who gets to share in prosperity and what would it take to build a fairer, more democratic future?

Newest episodes

Joel Bakan - When Corporations Stop Pretending to Care

Nov 9, 2026 35 min

For decades, corporations have told us they can make money while caring for people, communities and the planet. But what happens when they abandon even the pretense of care? In the opening episode of Prosperity Shared, Professor Carl Rhodes speaks with legal scholar, author and filmmaker Joel Bakan about the “moralising corporation” and the growing backlash against sustainability, diversity and so-called woke capitalism. Drawing on his new co-edited collection, The Moralizing Corporation: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Carewashing, Joel explains how businesses adopted the language of social responsibility while continuing to pursue profit and power. He argues that today’s openly anti-woke corporation is not a fundamental departure from the caring corporation, but another expression of the same underlying system. The conversation traces the transformation of corporate power since Joel’s landmark book and documentary The Corporation. It asks how corporations came to assume roles once held by democratic governments, why economic insecurity creates fertile ground for authoritarian politics, and what might restore our collective capacity to pursue equality, sustainability and the public good. In this episode What Joel means by the “moralizing corporation”How corporate carewashing differs from greenwashingWhy companies are retreating from DEI and sustainability commitmentsThe growing celebration of brutality, masculinity and anti-empathy About Joel Bakan Joel Bakan is a writer, filmmaker and Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and The New Corporation: How “Good” Corporations Are Bad for Democracy. Further Reading The Moralizing Corporation: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Carewashing The Corporation The New Corporation Joel Bakan’s website Prosperity Shared is a podcast from the Ultimo Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, exploring politics, inequality, democ...