Entrenchment, Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies, by Paul Starr, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2019. 280 pages, hardcover

Why should we, as Management scholars and educators, care about a book on political diagnosis? The answer is twofold. First, the calibre of the author (Paul Starr), an awardee of both Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes, a former policy advisor to the Clinton administration, and the author of The Transformation of American Medicine (1982), a book with a profound impact on American policy circles. Second, the core concept (entrenchment) of the book, and its potential to advance the process of institutional development, and the ways in which we can reform and change our institutions to better meet the current and pressing needs of the many, rather than preserve the unequal privileges of a few. In light of the geopolitical, social, and environmental pressures we see currently rising across the world (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi & Tihanyi, 2016; Howard-Grenville, Buckle, Hoskins & George, 2014) there is no better time to examine whether and how we can address some of these grand challenges by reforming and improving our institutions.