Corporations as Citizens: Political not Metaphorical

Pierre-Yves Néron and Wayne Norman

Business Ethics Quarterly, 2008, vol. 18, issue 1, 61-66

Abstract: At the center of our article “Citizenship, Inc.,” is a puzzle about a metaphor. Are corporations really a kind of citizen, or like citizens in some real way, or is talk of “corporate citizenship” all just a misleading metaphorical extension of the age-old concept of individual citizenship? In this reply to four very spirited responses to that article, we will not be defending our particular analysis of that metaphor so much as joining our colleagues in reflecting on the question of what academics are doing, or should be doing, when they take on the vocabulary of politics and business in this way. What can philosophers or social scientists expect to accomplish by telling fellow academics, or fellow citizens, that they should be using concepts like “corporate citizenship” one way rather than another? Is there a respectable methodology for shoring up this kind of advice? Or rather, are we all engaged in some kind of urbane political discourse attempting to push a vocabulary most likely to favor our own preferred ideological positions? We had relatively little to say on these questions in the original article, but we found many of the most interesting critiques or “friendly amendments” in the responses to be essentially about these “meta” and methodological questions (or derived from different answers to them).

Date: 2008
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