Inadvertent Citizens: Corporate Citizenship and Moral Actorhood

Abstract

The notion of citizenship is bound up with expectations about behaviour in public. In contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ focus on the private and economic realm, the ‘citoyen’ plays his social role in the public sphere. Citizenship refers to the conditions of membership in a political community and thus concerns publicly relevant and observable aspects of behaviour. Whether organizations — and business firms in particular — may be considered as ‘citizens’, depends on what aspects of their public role are highlighted.¹ On the one hand, most organizations cannot help but act in public and are therefore confronted with the expectations of various groups affected by their decision-making: ‘Organizations in modern societies are public not only in the sense that their structures, processes and ideologies are open to observation, but also in their ultimate dependence on public acceptance, i.e. positioning themselves in relation to the perceptions and policies of society at large’, summarizes Brunsson (1989: 216). On the other hand, liberals such as Milton Friedman (1970) argue that business decisions are essentially ‘private’ decisions made by or on behalf of the owners of a company. Yet those two perspectives can be easily reconciled: just as the individual is both a ‘bourgeois’ and a citoyen (depending on whether economic or political roles are concerned), organizational role-sets, too, include both private and public dimensions.