ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Global multi-stakeholder initiatives are important instruments that have the potential to improve the social and environmental sustainability of global supply chains. However, they often fail to comprehensively address the needs and interests of various supply-chain participants. While voluntary in nature, MSIs have most often been implemented through coercive approaches, resulting in friction among their participants and in systemic problems with decoupling. Additionally, in those cases in which deliberation was constrained between and amongst participants, collaborative approaches have often failed to materialize. (...) Our framework focuses on two key aspects of these breakdowns: assumptions about the orientation of MSI participants, and the deliberation processes that participants use to engage with each other to create these initiatives and sustain them over time. Drawing from stakeholder and deliberation theories, we revisit the concept of MSIs and show how their deliberative capacity may be enhanced in order to encourage participants to collaborate voluntarily. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this address I argue that different perspectives on the normative foundations of corporate responsibility reflect underlying disagreements about the ideal arrangement of tasks between market and state. I initially recommend that scholars look back to the “division of moral labor” inspired by John Rawls’ seminal work on distributive justice in order to rethink why, and to what extent, corporations take on responsibilities normally within the purview of government. I then examine how this notion is related to recent theoretical work (...) in the field of business ethics. I thereafter turn to provide a brief outline of an alternative view that sees corporations as having responsibilities in so far as markets are sites of delegated oversight over the production of social goods that might otherwise be administered by the state. (shrink)

Key accomplishments of political corporate social responsibility scholarship have been the identification of global governance gaps and a proposal how to tackle them. Political CSR scholarship assumes that the traditional roles of state and business have eroded, with states losing power and business gaining power in a globalized world. Consequently, the future of CSR lies in political CSR with new global governance forms which are organized by mainly non-state actors. The objective of the paper is to deepen our understanding of (...) political CSR and reintegrate notions of state power into political CSR scholarship by highlighting how states set the context within which business takes place, regulate offshore business practices, and play pivotal roles in new global governance mechanisms. (shrink)

This article analyses a recent discourse of responsibility that accompanies states’ foreign aid provision. States adopt this discourse of National Social Responsibility to show their complian...

This article addresses the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage in public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when multinational corporations operate in locations where national governance mechanisms are weak or even fail, where the rule of law is absent and there is a lack of democratic control. This deficit may (...) lead to a decline in the social acceptance of the business firm and its corporate political activities and, thus, to a loss of corporate legitimacy. Under these conditions corporations may compensate for the emerging democratic deficit and reestablish their legitimacy by internalizing democratic mechanisms within their organizations, in particular in their corporate governance structures and procedures. The authors analyze the available corporate governance models with the help of a typology and discuss the possible contributions of a new form of democratic corporate governance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Deliberative democratic theory, commonly used to explore questions of “political” corporate social responsibility, has become prominent in the literature. This theory has been challenged previously for being overly sanguine about firm profit imperatives, but left unexamined is whether corporate contexts are appropriate contexts for deliberative theory in the first place. We explore this question using the case of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign to show that significant challenges exist to corporate deliberation, even in cases featuring genuinely committed firms. We return to (...) the underlying social theory to show that this is not an isolated case: for-profit firms are predictably hostile contexts for deliberation, and significant normative and strategic problems can be expected should deliberative theory be imported uncritically to corporate contexts. We close with recent advances in deliberative democratic theory that might help update the PCSR project, and accommodate the application of deliberation to the corporate context, albeit with significant alterations. (shrink)

This article addresses the recent call in business ethics literature for a better understanding of corporations as political actors or entities. It first gives an overview of recent attempts to examine classical issues in business ethics through a political lens. It examines different ways in which theorists with an interest in the normative analysis of business practices and institutions could find it desirable and fruitful to use a political lens. This article presents a distinction among four views of the relations (...) between corporations and politics: corporations as distributive agents, corporations as political communities, corporate practices and policies as citizenship issues, and corporations as active participants in the political process. This article finishes with an examination of three challenges that need to be overcome by the theory of the firm as a political actor. (shrink)

This article connects the previously isolated literatures on corporate citizenship and corporate political activity to explain how firms construct political influence in the public sphere. The public engagement of firms as political actors is explored empirically through a discursive analysis of a public debate between the mining industry and the Australian government over a proposed tax. The findings show how the mining industry acted as a corporate citizen concerned about the common good. This, in turn, legitimized corporate political activity, which (...) undermined deliberation about the common good. The findings explain how the public sphere is refeudalized through corporate manipulation of deliberative processes via what we term corporate citizenspeak—simultaneously speaking as corporate citizens and for individual citizens. Corporate citizenspeak illustrates the duplicitous engagement of firms as political actors, claiming political legitimacy while subverting deliberative norms. This contributes to the theoretical development of corporations as political actors by explaining how corporate interests are aggregated to represent the common good and how corporate political activity is employed to dominate the public sphere. This has important implications for understanding how corporations undermine democratic principles. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper investigates whether, in theoretical terms, corporations can be citizens. The argument is based on the observation that the debate on “corporate citizenship” (CC) has only paid limited attention to the actual notion of citizenship. Where it has been discussed, authors have either largely left the concept of CC unquestioned, or applied rather unidimensional and decontextualized notions of citizenship to the corporate sphere. The paper opens with a critical discussion of a major contribution to the CC literature, the work (...) of Logsdon and Wood (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Logsdon and Wood 2002). It continues with a consideration of the nature and role of metaphors for business and of the contestable nature of the political concept of citizenship. It evaluates corporations as citizens through a four-dimensional framework of democratic citizenship offered by Stokes (2002). The analysis suggests that corporations do not easily fit the “liberal minimalist” model of citizenship. It finds, however some possibilities for fit with the three more participatory models. The paper concludes by cautioning against basing corporate citizenship on legal and administrative status or identity, and mapping out specific criteria by which we might determine whether corporations could be considered as citizens by virtue of their participation in processes of governance. (shrink)

The dominant framing of the political corporate social responsibility discussion challenges the traditional economic conception of the firm and aims to produce a paradigm shift in CSR studies wherein the traditional, apolitical view of corporations’ roles in society is replaced by the political conception of CSR. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion calls for a redirection to take international hard legal and moral regulations, as well as the need for the boundaries between (...) business and politics into account. (shrink)

The dominant understanding of political corporate social responsibility suggests new, broader political roles for businesses in the globalized economy, challenging the classical liberal social order. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion not only challenges the classical liberal social order but also goes against the more general political economic perspective of the regulated market economy. We argue that this latter tendency of the political CSR discussion is its main weakness. We introduce a Rawlsian (...) reframing of political CSR that is in line with the idea of a global-regulated market economy and compatible with some of the basic global ethical aims of the political CSR movement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Within corporate social responsibility (CSR), the exploration of the political role of firms (political CSR) has recently experienced a revival. We review three key periods of political CSR literature—classic, instrumental, and new political CSR—and use the Rawlsian conceptualization of division of moral labor within political systems to describe each period’s background political theories. The three main arguments of the paper are as follows. First, classic CSR literature was more pluralistic in terms of background political theories than many later texts. Second, (...) instrumental CSR adopted classical liberalism and libertarian laissez-faire as its structural logic. Third, new political CSR, based on a strong globalist transition of responsibilities and tasks from governments to companies, lacks a conceptualization of division of moral labor that is needed to fully depart from a classical liberalist position. We end by providing a set of recommendations to develop pluralism in political CSR. (shrink)

In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is (...) typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

Abstract:The organization is importantly different from both the nation-state and the individual and hence needs its own ethical models and theories, distinct from political and moral theory. To develop a case for organizational ethics, this paper advances arguments in three directions. First, it highlights the growing role of organizations and their distinctive attributes. Second, it illuminates the incongruities between organizations and moral and political philosophy. Third, it takes these incongruities, as well as organizations’ distinctive attributes, as a starting point for (...) suggesting an agenda for an ethics of organizations. (shrink)

According to Palazzo and Scherer, the changing role of business corporations in society requires that we take new measures to integrate these organizations into society-wide processes of democratic governance. We argue that their model of integration has a fundamental problem. Instead of treating business corporations as agents that must be held accountable to the democratic reasoning of affected parties, it treats corporations as agents who can hold others accountable. In our terminology, it treats business corporations as “supervising authorities” rather than (...) “functionaries.” The result is that Palazzo and Scherer’s model does not actually address the democratic deficit that it is meant to solve. In order to fix the problem, we advocate removing business corporations from any policymaking role in political CSR and limiting participation to political NGOs and other groups that meet the standards we set out for a politically representative organization (PRO). (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Drawing upon John Rawls's framework inThe Law of Peoples,this paper argues that MNEs have a responsibility to promote well-ordered social and political institutions in host countries that lack them. This responsibility is grounded in a negative duty not to cause harm. In addition to addressing the objection that promoting well-ordered institutions represents unjustified interference by MNEs, the paper provides guidance for managers of MNEs operating in host countries that lack just institutions. The paper argues for understanding corporate responsibility in relation (...) to the specific institutional environment in which MNEs operate. (shrink)

This article develops an integrative perspective on corporate responsibility by synthesising competing perspectives on the responsibility of the corporation at the organisational and societal levels of analysis. We review three major corporate responsibility perspectives, which we refer to as economic, critical, and politico-ethical. We analyse the major potential uses and pitfalls of the perspectives, and integrate the debate on these two levels. Our synthesis concludes that when a society has a robust division of moral labour in place, the responsibility of (...) a corporation may be economic without jeopardising democracy and sustainability. Moreover, the economic role of corporations neither signifies the absence of deliberative democratic mechanisms nor business practices extending beyond compliance. The study underscores the value of integrating different perspectives and multiple levels of analysis to present comprehensive descriptions and prescriptions of the responsibility phenomenon. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The primacy of shareholder demands in the traditional theory of the firm has typically excluded marginalised stakeholder voices. However, shareholders involved in social shareholder engagement purport to bring these voices into corporate decision-making. In response to ethical concerns about the legitimacy of SSE, we use the lens of discourse ethics to provide a normative analysis at both action and constitutional levels. By specifying three normative questions, we extend the analysis of SSE to identify a political role for shareholders in pursuit (...) of the common good. We demonstrate the desirability for SSE to promote regulatory/institutional change to guarantee marginalised stakeholders a voice in corporate decisions that affect them. The theory of SSE we propose thus calls into question the stark separation of the political and economic spheres and reveals an underlying tension, often overlooked, within the responsible investment literature. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is a revolutionary political ideal that requires fundamental changes in political institutions, bases of collective decision making, and the distribution of resources. Perhaps because of its revolutionary character accounts of deliberation in political theory thus far have offered little guidance for actors in actually-existing democratic circumstances. This article develops an ethical account of deliberative democratic action under imperfectly just conditions characterized by material and political inequality and failures of reciprocity. Under such conditions, appropriate principles of action can resolve (...) the tension between deliberation and confrontational political activism. The logic of this account parallels the justification for civil disobedience: the extent of permissible deviationfrom deliberative norms increases according to the adversity of political circumstances. This ethical account is composed of principles of deliberative activism, applications of those principles to four kinds of increasing unfavorable circumstances, and a menu of institutional and political strategies that increase deliberative inclusion and equality. (shrink)

Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to suggest that at least one strain of what has come to be called “stakeholder theory” has roots that are deeply libertarian. We begin by explicating both “stakeholder theory” and “libertarian arguments.” We show how there are libertarian arguments for both instrumental and normative stakeholder theory, and we construct a version of capitalism, called “stakeholder capitalism,” that builds on these libertarian ideas. We argue throughout that strong notions of “freedom” and “voluntary action” are the (...) best possible underpinnings for stakeholder theory, and in doing so, seek to return “stakeholder theory” to its managerial and libertarian roots found in Freeman (1984). (shrink)

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of (...) Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recently conceptualized and studied as a political phenomenon. Most debates in this scholarship have thus far focused on normative issues. Less attention has been paid to the explanatory potential of CSR research grounded in political theory and philosophy. In this article, we conduct a pragmatist reading of political scholarship on CSR and seek to deploy existing knowledge for research pursuing political explanation. We argue that the political ontologies that underlie scholarship on CSR can be (...) used to transform normative and descriptive research also for explanatory uses. We show how ontologies vary in terms of potential research objects and scopes of political explanation, and argue that the main types of political-ontological stances adopted in scholarship on CSR, foundational and post-foundational stances, offer explanatory analysis of different schematic guidelines. Our pragmatist reading of previous research and an empirical case illustration of political explanation of change in corporate responsibility in the biofuel industry demonstrate the opportunities, limitations, and challenges different political-ontological commitments provide for political explanation. (shrink)

The author of this major study compares the significantly different approaches to business ethics on both sides of the Atlantic and considers what they have to learn from each other. He has considerable experience of business ethics in both Europe and North America, having taught and researched the subject at the University of St Gallen in his native Switzerland before his appointment as Professor of International Business Ethics in the College of Business Administration, University of Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA. (...) Professor Enderle was also the founding Honorary Treasurer of the European Business Ethics Network and is an Associate Editor of this Review. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This paper argues that, although stakeholder engagement occurs within the context of power, neither market-centered CSR nor the deliberative model of political CSR adequately addresses the specter of power asymmetries and the inevitability of conflict in stakeholder relations, particularly for powerless stakeholders. Noting that the objective of stakeholder engagement should not be benevolence toward stakeholders, but mechanisms that address power asymmetries such that stakeholders are able to protect their own interests, I present a framework of stakeholder engagement based on agonistic (...) pluralism that seeks to structure and utilize discord rather than reduce or eliminate it. I then propose arbitration as an agonistic mechanism to address power asymmetries in stakeholder engagement and explore its implications. (shrink)

This article addresses the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage in public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when multinational corporations operate in locations where national governance mechanisms are weak or even fail, where the rule of law is absent and there is a lack of democratic control. This deficit may (...) lead to a decline in the social acceptance of the business firm and its corporate political activities and, thus, to a loss of corporate legitimacy. Under these conditions corporations may compensate for the emerging democratic deficit and reestablish their legitimacy by internalizing democratic mechanisms within their organizations, in particular in their corporate governance structures and procedures. The authors analyze the available corporate governance models with the help of a typology and discuss the possible contributions of a new form of democratic corporate governance. (shrink)

I investigate what, if anything, can be said in defense of Volkswagen's decision to install a cheat device in their diesel engines to evade NOx emission testing.

AbstractIn this paper I provide a decolonial critique of received knowledge about deliberative democracy. Legacies of colonialism have generally been overlooked in theories of democracy. These omissions challenge several key assumptions of deliberative democracy. I argue that deliberative democracy does not travel well outside Western sites and its key assumptions begin to unravel in the ‘developing’ regions of the world. The context for a decolonial critique of deliberative democracy is the ongoing violent conflicts over resource extraction in the former colonies (...) of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that deliberative democracy cannot take into account the needs of marginalized stakeholders who are defending their lands and livelihoods. The paper contributes to the literature by (1) offering a critique of hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference and (2) offering possibilities to imagine counterhegemonic alternatives for a democratization of democracy from below. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article studies multi-stakeholder initiatives as spaces for both deliberation and contestation between constituencies with competing discourses and disputed values, beliefs, and preferences. We review different theoretical perspectives on MSIs, which see them mainly as spaces to find solutions to market problems, as spaces of conflict and bargaining, or as spaces of consensus. In contrast, we build on a contestatory deliberative perspective, which gives equal value to both contestation and consensus. We identify four types of internal contestation which can be (...) present in MSIs—procedural, inclusiveness, epistemic, and ultimate-goal—and argue that embracing contestation and engaging in ongoing revision of provisional agreements, criteria, and goals can enhance the democratic quality of MSIs. Finally, we explore the implications of this perspective for theorizing about the democratic quality in MSIs and about the role of corporations in transnational governance. (shrink)