Building on literature in political CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) as well as responsible innovation and responsible lobbying, we introduce a framework to assess the legitimacy status of corporate political activity. We focus on the fact that companies frequently face sharp regulatory backlash after penetrating markets with their innovations. In response to regulatory backlash, big tech companies often employ an arsenal of corporate political activities to (re-)shape national and local regulatory environments, which raises the important questions about the legitimacy (...) of CPA tactics that we address. To develop and apply this framework, we briefly survey and then assess Uber’s corporate political activities in its 2015 New York City political campaign. (shrink)

The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as institutions for social and environmental governance in the global economy has received much scholarly attention over the past years. To date, however, research has yet to focus on assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in their interactions with other actors within larger systems of deliberation. Drawing on the deliberative systems perspective developed within deliberative democracy theory, we theorise a normative framework to evaluate the roles of MSIs within the broader systems of governance they co-construct (...) through their interactions with other initiatives, governments, non-governmental organisations, and other external actors. As we demonstrate in our evaluation of the illustrative case of the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety as a MSI in the context of the Bangladeshi garment industry, this framework can help researchers assess whether a MSI ultimately serves to enhance or undermine the deliberative legitimacy of the overall system of which it forms a part. (shrink)

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—private governance mechanisms involving firms, civil society organizations, and other actors deliberating to set rules, such as standards or codes of conduct, with which firms comply voluntarily—have become important tools for governing global business activities and the social and environmental consequences of these activities. Yet, this growth is paralleled with concerns about MSIs’ deliberative capacity, including the limited inclusion of some marginalized stakeholders, bias toward corporate interests, and, ultimately, ineffectiveness in their role as regulators. In this article, we (...) conceptualize MSIs as deliberative systems to open the black box of the different elements that make up the MSI polity and better understand how their deliberative capacity hinges on problems in different elements. On the basis of this conceptualization, we examine how deliberative mini-publics—forums in which a randomly selected group of individuals from a particular population engage in learning and facilitated deliberations about a topic—can improve the deliberative capacity of MSIs. (shrink)

To shield stakeholders from exploitation, society increasingly expects organizations to engage with stakeholders. While exploitation of stakeholders is of great concern, economic literature points to the costly nature of stakeholder engagement vis-à-vis alternative mechanisms that protect stakeholders, such as competitive markets. When the costs of stakeholder engagement outweigh the benefits, why would organizations engage with stakeholders? Through an analysis of the cooperative enterprise and a comparison with its capitalist counterpart, we theorize two additional reasons why stakeholder engagement is beneficial. First, (...) we explain how stakeholder engagement facilitates long-term organizational resilience and protection of stakeholders in times of crisis, and second, we show how engagement is a decisive ingredient in answering non-economic value requirements of stakeholders. To conclude, we contribute to the broader stakeholder engagement and cooperative literature by stressing that engagement practices, and particularly democratic governance arrangements, are subject to design principles that sometimes favor stakeholders in capitalist firms. (shrink)