Responsibility, Ethics and Legitimacy of Corporations PDF Download

Author: Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Publisher: Copenhagen Business School Press DK
ISBN: 9788763002202
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 532

View

Book Description
Business ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, values-driven management, corporate governance, and ethical leadership are necessary horizons for the legitimacy of corporations in the process of globalization. Based on hermeneutics and institutional analysis, this book discusses the place of values in corporations and the role of ethics in management. With the theories of business ethics as a starting point, it is possible to propose a vision of the good citizen corporation. The book presents theories, concepts of responsibility for stakeholder justice, and basic ethical principles of respect for autonomy, dignity, integrity, and vulnerability. This is the foundation for an analysis of the ethical relations to internal and external constituencies of the firm, i.e. shareholders, owners, investors, management, employees, consumers, and local community. The interaction with the environment is further analyzed with a focus on ethical principles as the basis for sustainability. This investigation culminates with the conceptualization of the firm as a collective and institutional moral agent. The content also includes analysis of concrete political developments in the US, Europe, and the United Nations. Finally, the book provides a framework for a new corporate strategy based on global business ethics.

Author: Jacob Dahl Rendtorff
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783030146214
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This Handbook forms part of wider research in responsibility, ethics and legitimacy of corporations. Through an interdisciplinary perspective with comparative integration of sociological, politological, philosophical, theological, ethical, economic, legal, linguistic and communication theoretical approaches this Handbook will clarify how the interrelation between company and environment is mediated by legitimating notions in public spaces and public relations; how and why these notions have changed radically; how these transformations strike on the epistemological as well as practical dimension of business companies; and the problems involved in these transformations at the macro-, meso- and micro levels. The Handbook begins with a historical introduction and chronology of the development of business legitimacy, providing a comprehensive assessment of the concept’s evolution and identifying the most influential authors and their works. These may be divided into authors who follow (1) a philosophical, sociological, or conceptual tradition in management and leadership in their treatment of legitimacy and those who belong to the research tradition of (2) application of the concept in management science and leadership as well as in organizational theory and business practice in the interdisciplinary perspective of the different approaches. The Handbook continues with systematic approaches and major themes developed in the concept of business legitimacy. Contributions here may be conceptual, empirical/applied or case studies. The different parts of the volume deal with the different topics to which business legitimacy has been applied, with how legitimacy is relevant in the various operational areas of the firm, and with the legitimacy theory’s responses to some of the most important issues that businesses and organizations currently face.

Author: Walther C. Zimmerli
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540708189
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

View

Book Description
This book represents an introduction to and overview of the diverse facets of the ethical challenges confronting companies today. It introduces executives, students and interested observers to the complex trends and developments in business ethics. Coverage presents industry-specific topics in ethics. The book also provides a general, interdisciplinary survey of the ethical dimensions of management and business.

Author: Archie B. Carroll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020948
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 567

View

Book Description
This landmark history of corporate responsibility documents corporate power and business behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century to the modern day. It shows how corporate responsibility has evolved, with the roles, responsibilities and performance of corporations coming increasingly under the spotlight as new norms of transparency and accountability emerge.

Author: Dorothea Baur
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9789400722545
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

View

Book Description
The interaction between corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has become an important topic in the debate about corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet, unlike the vast majority of academic work on this topic, this book explicitly focuses on clarifying the role of NGOs, not of corporations, in this context. Based on the notion of NGOs as political actors it argues that NGOs suffer from a multiple legitimacy deficit: they are representatives of civil society without being elected; the legitimacy of the claims they raise is often controversial; and there are often doubts regarding the legitimacy of the behaviour they exhibit in putting forward their claims. Set against an extended sphere of political action in the postnational constellation this book argues that the political model of deliberative democracy provides a meaningful conceptualization of NGOs as legitimate partners of corporations and it develops a conceptual framework that specifically allows distinguishing legitimate partner NGOs from two related actor types with whom they share certain characteristics but who differ with respect to their legitimacy. These related actor types are interest groups on the one hand and activists on the other hand. In conclusion it argues that a focus on the behaviour of NGOs is most meaningful for distinguishing them from interest groups and activists.

Author: Samuel O. Idowu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331910909X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 343

View

Book Description
This book deals with the role of international standards for corporate governance in the context of corporate social responsibility. Based on the fundamentals of moral theory, the book examines governance and CSR in general, addressing questions such as: Is “good governance” not affected by moral concerns? How do the principles and practices of CSR standards adhere to or conflict with insights from business ethics and moral theory? To what extent do the standards and governance models provide normative guidance? Do the standards and governance guidelines provide an adequate means of benchmarking and auditing? Are these standards a help or a hindrance to stakeholder engagement and transparency? The book provides insightful and thought-provoking answers to these and many other important questions concerning CSR standards, and offers a valuable resource for practitioners, academics and students at business schools and other institutions.

Author: Ronald R. Sims
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031305195X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

View

Book Description
Ethical failures are rooted in leadership failure, the lack of a corporate culture in which ethical concerns have been integrated, and unresponsiveness to key organizational stakeholders. This book seeks to enhance our understanding of the causes of ethical debacles in an era when ethical missteps can often lead to corporate bankruptcies or worse. Sims offers practical solutions for mitigating damage and preventing such problems from happening in the first place. He also explains how to institutionalize ethics throughout an organization. Sims asserts that organizations wishing to behave ethically must do more than harbor good intentions. Such companies must implement policies that inculcate the corporate culture with ethical values. They must also commit to ethical behavior in all interactions with internal and external stakeholders, including investors, customers, employees, and the community.

Author: James J. Brummer
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

View

Book Description
Drawing upon research from a variety of disciplines, this volume offers a systematic discussion of the issues and assumptions of the corporate responsibility debate. James J. Brummer provides an extensive review of the relevant literature and develops a methodology for treating specific problems of corporate responsibility, illustrating its use in actual practice. The book also proposes a theory of corporate responsibility and legitimacy that builds upon the concept of accountability and explores the relevance of applying methods of study traditionally associated with the humanities to contemporary problems of corporate ethics. The author begins by addressing general concepts and principles including types of corporate responsibility, relations of accountability, models of the corporation, and theories of institutional legitimacy. Part Two outlines the four theories of corporate responsibility--the classical, stakeholder, social demandingness, and social activist theories--and examines their major premises and supporting evidence. Two chapters treat the specific issue of plant closing or relocation in relation to each of the four theories of corporate responsibility. Finally, the author discusses collective and subordinate responsibility, paying particular attention to the concept of whistleblowing. The concluding chapter summarizes the corporate responsibility debate and analyzes various models of accountability. An ideal supplemental text for courses in business ethics and public administration, this volume is also an invaluable resource for executives confronted with issues of corporate responsibility in their own operations.

Author: Dorothée Baumann-Pauly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351277189
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

View

Book Description
The failure of many governments to provide basic rights for their citizens has given rise to the expectation that globally operating corporations should step in and fill governance gaps, for example in the area of human rights. Today, many large multinational corporations claim to conduct business in a socially responsible manner, yet no tools exist to assess whether and to what degree they have indeed systematically revised their business practices to take on these new responsibilities. Managing Corporate Legitimacy addresses these research gaps by clarifying the role of the corporation as a private actor in global governance at conceptual and empirical levels; by contributing to our theoretical understanding of CC as a new phenomenon in globalization; and by furthering the development of appropriate approaches to CC in practice through its toolkit. The tool structures the implementation process in five learning stages (defensive, compliance, managerial, strategic and civil). The final civil stage describes political corporate behaviour. The author includes an empirical assessment of five Swiss multinationals in this book which reveals that most companies – even those with relatively long-standing and mature policies on social and environmental issues – have only just started to learn how to become corporate citizens. The book therefore concludes with a discussion of an issue-specific extension of the assessment tool and presents methods for setting priorities in the approach to corporate citizenship that may also facilitate corporate engagement with stakeholders. The tools developed in this book provide practical and detailed guidance for implementing and embedding CC and managing corporate legitimacy. It will be essential reading for practitioners looking for ways to legitimize their engagement with societal issues and for academics considering how we can better measure the engagement of business with CC.

Author: David Rönnegard
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401797560
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

View

Book Description
It is uncontroversial that corporations are legal agents that can be held legally responsible, but can corporations also be moral agents that are morally responsible? Part one of this book explicates the most prominent theories of corporate moral agency and provides a detailed debunking of why corporate moral agency is a fallacy. This implies that talk of corporate moral responsibilities, beyond the mere metaphorical, is essentially meaningless. Part two takes the fallacy of corporate moral agency as its premise and spells out its implications. It shows how prominent normative theories within Corporate Social Responsibility, such as Stakeholder Theory and Social Contract Theory, rest on an implicit assumption of corporate moral agency. In this metaphysical respect such theories are untenable. In order to provide a more robust metaphysical foundation for corporations the book explicates the development of the corporate legal form in the US and UK, which displays how the corporation has come to have its current legal attributes. This historical evolution shows that the corporation is a legal fiction created by the state in order to serve both public and private goals. The normative implication for corporate accountability is that citizens of democratic states ought to primarily make calls for legal enactments in order to hold the corporate legal instruments accountable to their preferences.