Abstract
In this chapter, we examine legitimacy in relation to recent debates on the philosophy of management and corporations that have emerged to deal with the decline of Protestant ethics. On this basis, we discuss the concepts of corporate citizenship and the good citizen corporations as recent efforts to respond to the problem of corporate legitimacy. Finally, we discuss the recent use of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to propose a critical reading of the search for legitimacy in the Western philosophy of management.
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Notes
- 1.
M.C. Suchmann has given the most important definition of the concept of corporate legitimacy. He defines legitimacy as an effort to adapt to the internal and external environment of the organization. In general, we can say that the problem of legitimacy or “why corporations exist and why they are accepted or allowed to exist?” is one of the most foundational issues in philosophy of management. In this section, I deal with some of the recent development in philosophy of management from this perspective. In particular, I draw on some of the recent developments in Denmark where philosophers and social scientists have contributed to the development of the field. A reason for this has been the establishment of the Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy in the 1990s at Copenhagen, Business School, Denmark.
- 2.
It is difficult to determine the scope of the movement of spirituality in business. It comprises many different concepts of management, and popular management culture with management gurus like R. Stephen Covey may indeed be conceived as an expression of this new spirituality in management. Indeed, the role of spirituality in management is to make room for feelings and deep reflection in management, but in many cases, it remains nothing more than an ideological instrument to link employees to corporations.
- 3.
Wim Dubbink contributes with an analysis of these new relations between State, civil society, and the economic market where shared responsibility is needed and new partnerships emerge.
- 4.
Dominik Heil has developed this important point. He proposes to analyze business ethics and philosophy of management and corporations from the point of view of Heidegger’s philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger’s philosophy can be proposed as a critical approach to the metaphysical presuppositions of contemporary philosophy of management that may be viewed as a kind of metaphysics of the subject and of the intersubjectivity of the organization and corporation.
- 5.
Jesper Kunde argues that corporate religion is nothing but a metaphor for the idea that the company should have a meaning, a direction, and an idea. Employees should learn about this idea through communication from the leader, and this idea sets limits for those who do not want to be a part of the corporation. Companies with strong cultures are characterized by a relation to common values as though they were a religion. Kunde argues that those companies are sometimes regarded by their environments as religious sects and that this should be viewed as a good thing because it shows that it is a company that has a clear idea and that this brand has been communicated efficiently in its environment. Kunde also argues for a concept of corporate religion that is not a cynical or nihilistic concept of religion but rather a loose concept meaning to have values and believe them. We can argue, however, that this concept of corporate religion is still problematic because the metaphor changes the corporation into a kind of religious sect with all the relations of manipulation, domination, and ideology that this implies.
- 6.
The books about corporate religion, following the ideas proposed by Jesper Kunde, are first of all about marketing and branding of corporations by establishing a strong value-based culture with the creation of a company with a religious soul or spirit. The internal personality of the corporation is conceived as important to create a good image from the outside, as Tom Peters, who uses the work of Jesper Kunde, has said. From the marketing perspective, corporate religion is first of all about creating the illusion that the company has a soul so that the company can appear as a good corporate citizen to the public. The issue of corporate responsibility is important, but this concept of corporate religion seems to address emotions and appearance rather than focus on the real ethical and political issues of the reputation and appearance of corporations in society. Looking at this creation of the soul of the company as a branding instrument, it is tempting to agree with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that “si l’entreprise a une âme, ce serait la plus pire des choses,” meaning that it would be an impossible situation if we were to have corporate consciousness without corporate morality. However, as we shall see later, there is a close link between collective action and ethical responsibility.
- 7.
The essay is a revised version of the paper new models of leadership – spiritual-based leadership: a matter of faith and confidence. Presented at the conference: leading and managing human resources from a strategic perspective: focus on the service sector in India, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.
- 8.
A further example of such a spiritual turn in business economics is the search for irrational spaces in the daily work activities in the firm. We can call it a new attempt to mystify the relation of work in a criticism of the goal-oriented and utility-based thought that characterizes Protestant ethics. This approach can be found in the work of Danish business economist Martin Fuglsang. In his work which was considered very controversial in Denmark, we find an analysis of the self-understanding of a young biotechnological entrepreneur and of his activities as researcher and innovator. This analysis is characterized by a deep need to reinvent the poetics and passion of the human work life. It is a search for a calling of work after the decline of Protestant ethics, but it is also a search for a calling with a new focus on mysticism and an enchanted world. The book is full of citations of different poets, and it is methodologically based on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and fundamental ontology combined with the use of insights from social constructivism and research in network analysis. This approach searches for mythical, poetic, and religious elements of work and can therefore be considered as a radical critique of the dry rationalism of traditional Protestant ethics.
- 9.
In this context, we can refer to Luc Bouckaert’s work where he shows how the personalism and existentialism in French philosophy can be used to develop a humanistic spiritual approach to philosophy of management.
- 10.
In this context, we can mention the Danish philosopher, phenomenologist, and hermeneutic philosopher Ole Fogh Kirkeby who has published three books that can loosely be characterized as an existentialist approach to management. We can also mention the psychologist Karen Schultz who also in Denmark contributed to develop this existentialist approach to management. And, finally, we can mention some different and very controversial attempts to apply the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard to philosophy of management.
- 11.
This application of systems theory within philosophy of management as a bridge between philosophy of management and the social sciences represents a very good indication of the recent developments in the Danish context which are quite unique in an international context. In particular, the Danish scholars of systems theory Ole Thyssen, Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, and Susanne Holmström have contributed to the development of this approach. They show how a corporation can be conceived as a social system that interacts with society and tries to survive in turbulent conditions with CSR and business ethics as possible strategies for this survival in a complex world.
- 12.
Many people have developed the concept of corporate citizenship as essential to the recent developments in philosophy of management. Scherer and Palazzo show that the corporate citizenship agenda at the global level is proposed as a new approach to corporate citizenship. Jacob Dahl Rendtorff proposes a philosophy of corporate legitimacy based on corporate citizenship in his work on responsibility, ethics, and legitimacy of corporations.
- 13.
The Swiss scholar Peter Ulrich was probably one of the first philosophers of management who developed the theory of corporate citizenship and the good citizen corporation in a comprehensive framework with the concept of republican business ethics. However, this work has only been published in English recently, and therefore, it has had limited impact. Jacob Dahl Rendtorff has further developed the concept of the good citizen corporation as essential to determine the citizen responsibilities of the firm.
- 14.
In his theory of organization, Michel Foucault has implicitly emphasized these disciplinary elements of modern organizations. The ideas of self-discipline, self-management, and self-governance are an integrated part of the rationality in modern governmental systems. The rationality of governance of values and ethics can, according to this criticism, be said to represent an internalization of norms that contribute to the self-governance of the individual. Accordingly, for the managerial perspective, management with a focus on ethics and values is much more efficient for control and manipulation than traditional concepts of hierarchical management based on orders and sanctions.
- 15.
In his analysis of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, Jürgen Habermas addresses this problem of the conception of rational modernity. The emergence of positivistic scientific rationality emerged with the secularization of traditional religious worldviews. According to Habermas, this is the kind of rationality that authors like Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno agree to call instrumental, and we may also suggests that it is this rationality that locks people in the iron cage. Alternatively, the project of a theory of communicative action tries to overcome this limited concept of rationality by developing the theory of communicative rationality. In fact, this project is also very important for our description of the foundations of business ethics because this other kind of rationality opens for democratic and communicative dialogue within the systems of modern society.
- 16.
We can say that the firm has to work as a good citizen that respects the republican constitution and contributes to the spirit of community. The republican ethics combines this respect for community with the idea of the integrity and autonomy of citizens. We can argue that this idea refers to what Habermas calls “Verfassungspatriotismus” – constitutional patriotism.
- 17.
In this sense, we can propose a critique of dominating positions of philosophy of management as being marked by Western metaphysics of subjectivity and technology. We can mention (1) the Protestant ethics, (2) corporate religion, (3) corporate spirituality, (4) corporate existentialism, (5) systems theory, (6) theories of corporate citizenship and the political corporation, (7) theories of charismatic leadership philosophy as proposed by the Danish philosophy Ole Fogh Kirkeby, and (8) post-structuralist and social constructivist approaches to philosophy of management. All these approaches are according to Lauritzen marked by blindness to the real issues of management because the concern for instrumentalization and technological success of the organization remain hidden presuppositions of these theories that never get to ask radical questions of the fundamental meaning of management and organization.
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Rendtorff, J.D. (2013). Recent Debates in Philosophy of Management. In: Luetge, C. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1494-6_67
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