The document discusses the 2007-2008 financial crisis and its consequences. It analyzes how the crisis emerged from a combination of individual greed, organizational mismanagement, government failure to regulate the financial system, and the fostering of moral hazard. The crisis highlighted the need for more strategic corporate social responsibility practices. It caused a major backlash against American-style capitalism and shifts in global economic power. Key questions remain about what obligations societies and organizations have to prevent future crises and reform the global economic system.

1. CASE STUDY CAPITALISM
This case views the global, capitalist economic system through
the prism of the 2007–2008 financial crisis (referred to here as
the
Financial Crisis). More than a decade later, what more do we
now know? How did the crisis emerge, and what were its
consequences
(short- and long-term)? What challenges does it present for
capitalism today? What was the role of social responsibility?
And
perhaps most importantly, what changes does a strategic CSR
perspective suggest moving forward?
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
In many ways, the dramatic economic events that began toward
the end of 20071 (widely reported as “the most serious financial
crisis since the Great Crash of 1929”2 or the “Great
Recession”3) brought into focus the comprehensive nature of
CSR. From
individual greed and the abdication of responsibility to
organizational fraud and the mismanagement of resources, to
governmental
failure to monitor and adequately regulate the financial system,
the crisis emphasized the many interlocking factors that make
CSR so
complex. At the same time, and with the benefit of hindsight,
these events demonstrate how straightforward CSR can be. At
its
simplest, CSR is not rocket science. It is often common sense,
combined with an enlightened approach to management and

2. decision
making. To look back at some of the decisions that contributed
to the economic crisis and try to rationalize why they were
made,
however, represents an exercise in exasperation:
What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a
year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-twoyears
mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that
mortgage with 100 others into bonds—which
Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s rate[s] AAA—and then selling
them to banks and pension funds the world over?4
Essentially, the crisis resulted from the cumulative effects of
multiple bad decisions by many individuals who had lost their
sense of perspective.5 What was amazing
at the time was “how so many people could be so stupid . . . and
self-destructive all at once”
6
to produce “a near total breakdown of responsibility at every
link in our financial chain.”7 The scale of
At the height of the boom, the subprime mortgage industry in
the United States had clearly lost all sense of proportion. The
result
was higher default rates and, as a consequence, higher rates of
home repossessions:
Between 2005 and 2007, which was the peak of sub-prime
lending, the top 25 subprime originators made almost
$1,000bn in loans to more than 5m borrowers, many of whom

3. have [since] had their homes repossessed.10
The industry as a whole experienced all the signs of a bubble,
the aftermath of which generated dramatic headlines such as
“Sex,
Lies, and Mortgage Deals.”11 As a society, we should have
picked this up earlier and acted to diffuse it. As such, the
Financial Crisis
highlights the central role of CSR in today’s global business
environment. It is a lens through which excesses can be
minimized, risk
can be mitigated, and value can be optimized. At various stages,
key actors suspected the system was unsustainable, but had no
self-
interest in advocating for change. As Citibank’s Chuck Prince
said in 2007, shortly before the crash and his ouster as CEO
later that
year, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and
dance. We’re still dancing.”12 When firms lack a CSR
perspective, they
not only endanger themselves but also can cause great harm to
society.
Moral Hazard
The Financial Crisis was driven by three main factors: first, the
housing market bubble, which was fuelled by low interest rates
and
easy access to mortgages (e.g., so-called “liar”13 or “ninja”14
loans); second, the under pricing of risk, particularly by
investors on
Wall Street; and third, the failure (or inability) of the regulatory
infrastructure to police the increasingly liquid global financial
market.
In other words, there is plenty of blame to go around—from the
individuals who sold mortgages that had attractive commissions

4. but
were unlikely to be repaid, to the firms that allowed these sales
to continue because they were passing on the risk, to the
regulators
who failed to oversee the markets it was their responsibility to
monitor, to the investors who developed complex securities and
other financial instruments that few people (including
themselves) fully understood. This culpability extends to the
people who failed
to question whether it was wise to apply for 100 percent
mortgages on hugely inflated home prices with little or nothing
down,
purely on the belief that house prices would continue to rise,
and the confidence that, either way, they would be able to
refinance in
a couple of years. All of these decisions were made in an
atmosphere of overdependence on the market as the ultimate
arbiter that
relieved individual actors of personal responsibility for many of
their day-to-day decisions.
This faith in the market was misplaced because of its underlying
rules, which distorted the dynamic interplay of demand and
supply.
This structure, put in place over decades by biased or ill -
informed politicians (who passed hastily constructed
regulations) and short-
sighted executives (who were only too willing to forget any
lessons learned from previous recessions) enabled the crisis and
inflamed
it once it had started. In essence, moral hazard was rife—the
finance industry was essentially rigged to fail. Over time, a
system of
incentives had been put in place whereby the rewards to
business were privatized (accrued directly to individuals), while
the risk was
socialized (borne by the system through financial institutions

5. that were deemed too big and important to fail); this represents,
according to George Soros, the failure of a pure market
ideology:
Moral Hazard
To take risk in search of personal benefit where the
consequences of that risk are not borne by the individual. The
effect is
to privatize gains and socialize losses.
Western governments and businesses have essentially created an
unsustainable system.16 As Soros notes, in order to avoid the
damage to the broader economy that would result from
undermining the positions of global financial traders,
governments and
central banks averted their eyes from the moral hazard that is an
inherent part of the financial system. The result was “a system
of
asymmetric incentives” backed by a federal agreement that
“every time the credit expansion ran into trouble the financial
authorities
intervened, injecting liquidity and finding other ways to
stimulate the economy.”17
Martin Wolf in the Financial Times paints a picture of equally
complicated interacting causes that include a “fundamentally
defective

6. financial system,” “rational responses to incentives,” “the short-
sightedness of human beings,” overly loose US monetary policy,
and
“the massive flows of surplus capital” around the globe.18 He
highlights the role of governments in sustaining a system that
has
become too important to the economy. In essence, everyone
knows the large financial firms are too big to fail, yet everyone
with
sufficient power to do anything about it is OK with that:
Those who emphasise rationality can readily point to the
incentives for the financial sector to take undue risk. This is the
result of the interaction of “asymmetric information”—the fact
that insiders know more than anybody else what is going
on—with “moral hazard”—the perception that the government
will rescue financial institutions if enough of them fall into
difficulty at the same time. There is evident truth in both
propositions: if, for example, the UK government feels obliged
to
rescue a modest-sized mortgage bank, such as Northern Rock,
moral hazard is rife.19
This suspicion of Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism cut across
the usual political boundaries. Right-wing industrialists disliked
it, but so did left-wing labor unions. Chinese communists felt
threatened, but so did Green Party activists in Germany. . . .
The
critique of U.S. liberalism . . . is shared by a diverse group that
includes
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jibao and

7. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.20
This backlash began more than a decade ago, in the immediate
aftermath of the Financial Crisis, but continues to resonate
today.
What is not clear, ultimately, is how effective or self-sustaining
this critique will be and whether, in conjunction with any shift
in
economic ideology, there will be a corresponding shift in global
political power. The dominant feature of the US economic
model
prior to the crisis was an inherently unstable combination of
excessively low savings and excessively high borrowing. This
surplus of
credit was being used to finance an unsustainable level of
consumption—unsustainable because the United States was
consistently
spending more than it saved. That money had to come from
somewhere, and most of it came from China. As such, the only
real,
long-term solution to the crisis is a rebalancing of demand and
supply within the global economy,21 which represents a shift in
influence from the borrower to the lender:
[The crisis] is not only a crisis of capitalism or of a particular
form of capitalism after all; it’s one of U.S. economic and
global
power. . .. The fact that [the meeting to discuss a global
response is] of the G-20 rather than the
Group of Seven . . . is a symbol of the decline of U.S. economic
power exposed by the crisis.22

8. The sense was that things had changed and US capitalism, as the
driving force behind globalization, is slowly losing its ability to
shape
the world:
Even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as [The
Economist] has to admit that there was something rotten in
finance.
The basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risktakers are
allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if
taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it.23
The debate that has emerged within the CSR community
regarding the future shape of capitalism reflects this shift in the
content and
tone of discussions about the global economic system. Thomas
Friedman in The New York Times, for example, highlights the
intersection of the economic and environmental crises:
began to appear in respected outlets. This sense of seismic
change was reinforced by a series of articles in the Financial
Times about
the crisis and its consequences for the economic order. The goal
of the series, which was titled the “Future of Capitalism,” was

9. to
assess the consequences of the crisis, given that the
“assumptions that prevailed since the 1980s embrace of the
market now lie in
shreds.” Representative of the debate was this comment in the
opening article in the series:
It is impossible at such a turning point to know where we are
going. . .. Yet the combination of a financial collapse with a
huge recession, if not something worse, will surely change the
world. The legitimacy of the market will weaken. The
credibility of the US will be damaged. The authority of China
will rise. Globalisation itself may founder.27
Combined with Bill Gates’s call for “creative capitalism”28
(2008) and Muhammad Yunus’s book Creating a World Without
Poverty29 (2009), the sense at the time was of a point of
“inflection”30 in the economic history of our planet. While we
might not
have expected measurable change immediately, the intellectual
shift indicated that whatever shape globalization took going
forward,
it would be different than it was before the crisis.
Occupy Wall Street
The resulting economic reality led initially to various forms of
protest, most notably the Occupy Wall Street movement
(http://occupywallst.org/), which initially started with a tweet
by Adbusters (#occupywallstreet). It took root in Zuccotti Park
in
Lower Manhattan, but soon spread worldwide. The failure of
this movement to organize and sustain its momentum does not

10. diminish the power of the ideas on which it was founded. An
important indicator of change, therefore, will be whether the
intellectual driving force behind Occupy Wall Street that
challenged the legitimacy of the efficient market can ever be
corralled into a
meaningful platform for reform.
Along these lines, the evolving thoughts of Alan Greenspan,
chair of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, on the self-
policing
role of market forces is instructive. In 1963, Greenspan wrote
that it would be self-defeating (and, therefore, highly unlikely)
for firms
“to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy
buildings. It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have
a
reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.” By 2008,
in testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and
Government
Reform, however, Greenspan admitted the error in this line of
thought:
Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending
institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are
in a
state of shocked disbelief. . . . This modern [free market]
paradigm held sway for decades.
The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the
summer of last year.33
Greenspan’s shift demonstrates the limits of the unregulated
market (the “efficient market hypothesis”)34 in the face of
incentives
that significantly distort the checks and balances that are
theoretically in place. As summarized in a Financial Times

11. editorial, “the
intellectual impact of the crisis has already been colossal. The
‘Greenspanist’ doctrine in monetary policy is in retreat. . . .
Finance has
already changed irrevocably.”35 The extent of public anger
toward the finance industry was demonstrated over time in
regulatory
action intended to hold banks to account for their wrongdoing.
While very few individuals were ever indicted (let alone sent to
jail)36
for their roles in the Financial Crisis, the firms they worked for
were penalized heavily:
The six biggest U.S. banks, led by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
(JPM) and Bank of America Corp., have piled up $103 billion in
legal costs since the financial crisis, more than all dividends
paid to shareholders in the past five years. That’s the amount
allotted to lawyers and litigation, as well as for settling claims
about shoddy mortgages and foreclosures, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg. The sum, equivalent to spending
$51 million a day, is enough to erase everything the banks
earned for 2012.37
While the legal costs associated with the Financial Crisis for the
world’s sixteen largest banks have been estimated to top £200
billion
(perhaps hitting $306 billion), Figure II.1 illustrates the extent
of the fines paid by the six largest US banks. In the end,
“JPMorgan and Bank of America bore about 75 percent of the
total costs.”39 In Bank of America’s case, much of this total is
attributed to its purchase of Countrywide—a decision that
“‘turned out to be the worst decision we ever made,’ said one
Bank of

12. America director who had voted for the Countrywide deal.”40
In total, since 2008, the bank “has paid monetary and non-
monetary
fines and penalties of more than $91 billion . . . in some 51
settlements, including a record
$16.65 billion to the Justice Department and several states.”41
As an indication of its further fall from grace, in 2013 the bank
was
removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, along
with Alcoa and Hewlett-Packard, to be replaced by
Goldman Sachs, Visa, and Nike.42
As such, the Financial Crisis refocused the debate on the
personal ethics of decision makers and the wisdom of fostering
leaders
willing to make the best decisions in the long-term interests of
their organizations and stakeholders. Together with the debate
about
the implications of the crisis for the global political power
balance and the form of capitalism that will drive globalization
forward, the
crisis injects an element of urgency to achieving cross-cultural
understanding in a complex global business environment, where
decisions taken by firms in one country have implications that
can reverberate around the world. In particular, this crisis
crystallizes a
number of questions that highlight the importance of CSR: What

13. does it mean for society when widespread business failure
results in
broad social and economic harm? How will this affect the
environment in which subsequent generations seek jobs and
launch the
firms of the future? How will societal expectations of these
firms change (if at all), and how should the business community
respond?
And essentially, what obligations do we have as individuals,
organizations, governments, or societies to avert similar crises
in the
future?
Source: Saabira Chaudhuri, “U.S. Banks’ Legal Tab Is Poised to
Rise,” The Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2013,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304470504579
163810113326856/.
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS—TEN YEARS ON
When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection in
September 2008, “it was the biggest bankruptcy filing in
history— 10 times
the failure of the fraud-riddled energy company Enron.” The
collapse led to the firm’s 25,000 employees losing their jobs
and the
demise of “the oldest and fourth largest US investment bank”; it
also “sparked the global financial crisis.”43 In the decade since,
following that “moment when everything changed,”44 we have
had some time to reflect:
Prior to Lehman, it was easy to believe that housing prices
could only go up and that we could always rely on debt to

14. maintain our standard of living. We shrugged as manufacturing
jobs disappeared . . . and good middleclass jobs became
harder to find. We didn’t talk much about income inequality.
Nor did we care much that Wall Street had developed a
mercenary trading culture, which had little to do with providing
capital for companies, ostensibly its reason for being. Post-
Lehman, economic reality set in.45
Ten years after the end of the Financial Crisis, while those mos t
closely involved in the decisions taken at the time seek to
reassure us
that the response was a success,46 others argue that little has
changed:
The finance sector, which caused the crisis, looks remarkably
unaltered. Banks may now hold more capital and their
bonuses are now tied to longer-term performance. But bonuses
are still very high; the average payout on Wall Street [in
2017] was $184,220, just shy of the 2006 record. Scandals over
banks’ bad behaviour, in areas such as price-fixing, money
laundering and mis-selling continue to come to light.49
In other words, the real danger is not that things are simply
“unchanged,” but that the situation is now much worse. By
delaying
many of the more radical remedies that would help protect
finance from itself, we have also simply delayed the day of
reckoning:

15. Central banks brought a global economic heart attack to an end
by performing emergency surgery. But the patient has
gone back to his old habits of smoking, heavy drinking and
gorging on fatty foods. He may be looking healthy now. But
the next attack could be even more severe and the medical
techniques that worked a decade ago may not be successful a
second time.50
Although the governmental response at the time almost certainly
prevented a deeper depression from occurring, it can also be
argued that insufficiently radical action was taken. This has
subsequently led to additional social problems, such as rising
income and
wealth inequality, that have led some commentators to suggest
that those activists looking to reform capitalism missed an
opportunity to introduce real change:
The Financial Crisis continues to reverberate today, but in terms
of consequences that range beyond the economic and into the
political:
September 2008 was a near-death experience for global
capitalism. At one point there were fears for the entire western
banking system. . .. The moment was ripe for politicians’ brave
enough to state the obvious: that the crisis was the result
of removing all the shackles on global financial capitalism put
in place for good reason in the 1930s. But social democratic
parties . . . were timid when they should have been brave and
have paid a heavy price as a result. Mainstream parties

16. patched up the system and paid scant heed to the anger felt by
those who felt ignored. The bitterness bubbled away and
eventually found other ways of manifesting itself.51
In a democracy, the pitchfork-wielding masses will eventually
make themselves heard. The story of American politics over the
past decade is the story of how the forces Obama and Geithner
failed to contain reshaped the world. The day-to-day drama
of bank failures and bailouts eventually faded from the
headlines. But the effects of the disruption never went away,
unleashing partisan energies on the Left (Occupy Wall Street)
and the Right
(the Tea Party) that wiped out the political era that came before
and ushered in a poisonous, polarizing one.52
The longer we leave this, the harder it is going to become, and
the more painful the correction will be. In the meantime, the
failure of
capitalism to solve the underlying issue of the fair distribution
of wealth across society has caused a vacuum that some are
seeking to
fill with more radical (and less effective) alternatives.
The Rise of Socialism?
The institutional response to the Financial Crisis has not lived
up to many people’s expectations. This is apparent in three
areas in
particular. First, the system remains largely unchanged. The
banks are still too big to fail, and the CEOs of JP Morgan and
Goldman
Sachs, as well as others, still carry great weight—“even after
the post-crisis toughening of regulation, it is arguable that the
big banks

17. are so complex and lacking in transparency as to be
unmanageable.”53 As a result, finance is as dominant as ever.
The stock market’s
daily performance is still reported at the end of every news
broadcast, while a firm’s stock price drives many operating
decisions. As
Rana Foroohar of Time puts it, “the business of
America isn’t business anymore, it’s finance”:54
Financiers in recent decades have made their money by focusing
more on wealth creation through manipulating and timing
markets rather than by lending and creating. Investors, asset
managers, traders, and others have figured out how to craft
financial products that can make money but that do not result in
jobs or businesses.55
Second, few individuals were ever held to account for the
widespread negligence and culpability that caused the Financial
Crisis. Even though white-collar crime is notoriously difficult
to prosecute, it is still astounding that of the 156 cases
(criminal and civil) brought by the federal government since
2009 against the ten largest US banks,
in 81% of those cases, individual employees were neither
identified nor charged. A total of 47 bank employees were
charged in relation to the cases. One was a boardroom-level
executive. . . . Of the 11 people who went to trial or a hearing
and had a ruling in their case, six were found not liable or had
the case dismissed. That left a total of five bank employees at
any level against whom the government won a contested case.56
Third, the core problem, excessive personal debt, remains. What

18. is frustrating is that while mortgages are now largely under
control
(with some worrying exceptions),57 a different debt has
emerged—one with the potential to inflame reactionary calls:
[Today] mortgage borrowing, the culprit in countless crises
through history, looks tame. But in its place a student debt
bubble has inflated. Borrowing for higher education seems
prudent, but then borrowing for a home was a no-brainer, too,
until a decade ago. Student loans . . . can’t be discharged in
bankruptcy . . . which means they will haunt millions of
borrowers for years to come.58
The combination of the system remaining unchanged, the lack
of accountability, and the rise of student debt is combustible
and
leaves us exposed to future crises.59 There is widespread
disaffection, particularly among younger, more vulnerable
generations who
see the mess and realize that they are going to have to clean it
up.60 This is largely driven by feelings of injustice, as wealth
and
income inequality grow to alarming levels:
In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5
percent of our national income. Today they take home more
than 20 percent. In major sectors of the economy—banking,
airlines, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications—
economic power is increasingly concentrated in a small number

19. of companies.
The result of all this is that people have “lost faith in the
system—not only in the banks and mortgage lenders, but in
capitalism
itself.”62 This outcome has been building over many decades
and multiple crises. In some ways, the Financial Crisis did not
create
new problems; it merely inflamed problems that were already
there (“stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about
immigration
and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government”).63
The result has been “a wave of nationalism, protectionism and
populism
in the West today.”64 The key question, therefore, is whether
these problems are an inevitable component of capitalism or
whether
they are a function of a distorted implementation of the current
version. Either way, these frustrations have continued to grow,
in
both scale and scope, and suggest the need for some kind of
change:
And if you don’t solve this problem, voters around the world
have demonstrated that they’re quite willing to destroy
market mechanisms to get the security they crave. They will
trash free trade, cut legal skilled immigration, attack modern
finance and choose state-run corporatism over dynamic free
market capitalism.65
In a 2017 opinion poll, “American millennials closely split on

20. the question of what type of society they would prefer to live
in: 44
percent picked a socialist country, 42 percent a capitalist
one.”66 This is startling, given the levels of wealth Western
capitalist
societies have created over the last century or so. Even more
recently, Fortune Magazine declared that “when
65% of people under the age of 35 believe that socialism is a
better model, we have a problem.”67 And this concern is far
from
limited to the US:
In Britain, less than one in five people agree with the statement
that the next generation will be richer, safer and healthier
than the last. . . . Three-quarters of Britons now favour full
nationalisation of all utilities and rail infrastructure. Asked to
describe capitalism, people view it as “selfish,” “greedy” and
“corrupt.”68
What is the effect of (1) the weakening of Western liberal
democracy,69 (2) a loss of confidence in capitalism, and (3) the
failure to
distribute the benefits of globalization more equitably? One
possibility is that people will begin to reconsider “the
respective
weighting . . . between the role of markets and government,
between the invisible hand and the visible one.”70 A likely
outcome of
this discussion will be that the demands placed on for-profit
firms will shift in ways that favor the individual in the short
term over
the group in the long term. Along these lines, the specter of

21. socialism is now being discussed as a solution to capitalism’s
worst
failings. In the US, for example:
Public support for socialism is growing. . . . Membership in the
Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist
organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among
young people.71
One problem with this narrative, however, is that the label
“socialism” is thrown around a lot in US political debate,
without much
agreement over what it means:
A recent Gallup poll showed that 57% of Democrats have
positive views about socialism. But the poll never defined
“socialism,” so precisely what people were expressing support
for remains unclear.72
Nevertheless, the concept of “woke business” has emerged. As
the CEO of Levi’s jeans, Chip Bergh, stated recently, “while
taking a
stand can be unpopular with some, doing nothing is no longer an
option. . . . Business has a critical role to play and a moral
obligation
to do something”—a statement that the National Rifle
Association labeled as “a particularly sad episode in the current
surge in
corporate virtue signaling.”73 Yet the underlying shift in tone is
tangible. Capitalism as we know it is under attack, and more is
expected of firms as a result. The tenth anniversary of the
Financial Crisis serves only to remind many of what went
wrong, but also

22. of what has yet to be fixed. Whether the substance of this
critique and proposed solutions are more fanciful than realistic,
it is up to
business to defend the global economic system that has
historically created so much wealth for so many.74 As noted in
the Financial
Times, “capitalism requires legitimacy. It would thrive over the
long term only if it were seen to be on the side of the welfare of
the
nation’s citizens.”75
In beginning this progress toward reform, it is important to
reinforce the point that capitalism cannot be “on the side” of
anyone. It is
a tool we have developed to structure society. As such, it will
do what we want it to do. If we want to reduce inequality and
redistribute wealth more equitably, then we can do that, but it
takes stakeholder engagement to bring it about. Whether such
policies would produce better outcomes is the subject of a hot
debate that today can be traced back directly to the Financial
Crisis.
But it is important to state that capitalism is not the problem. If
there is a problem, it is in the way capitalism has been
implemented.
As such, we can implement it differently, if we want to and are
willing to engage sufficiently to make it happen. In short,
“capitalism
isn’t the problem. Capitalism is the solution”76 within a
strategic CSR framework.
Strategic CSR Debate

23. MOTION: The Occupy Wall Street campaign
(http://occupywallst.org/) was a success.
The x axis shows the different banks who have paid fines in the
years from 2010 to 2013. The y axis shows the fines in billions
of
dollars and ranges from 0 to $25, in intervals of $5 billion. The
below table shows the values of the fines paid, by each bank in
this
time period, on this bar graph:

24. EN 362 Stephen Crane “The Open Boat” Dr. Lin
Knutson
Answer these questions over the story:
1. Explain the significance of the first line of the story.
2. What adjectives are used to describe the waves and the
ocean?
3. How many are in the boat? List them.
4. Explain these symbols:
A. The shipwreck
B. The house of refuge
C. The shark
5. How does Crane use point of view? Who is telling this
story?
6. How does Crane use repetition in this story? Give an example
of a line that is repeated.
7. State who dies at the end, and explain why this is ironic

25. 8. Why does Crane make fun of the women who bring coffee to
the survivors?
9. Define the term “literary Naturalism”
10. Explain how literary Naturalism applies to the story “The
Open Boat.”