Tracking Global Corporate Citizenship: Some Reflections on ‘Lovesick' Companies

This paper provides an outline of some of the issues I am dealing with in connection to a research project being undertaken on Global Corporate Citizenship (GCC). This research is in its early stages so what is provided here is preliminary and designed to raise rather more issues than it solves. In particular, I am concerned to deal with what it might mean for companies to be described, or to describe themselves, as Global Corporate Citizens. In the general literature on corporate responsibility there is a move away from companies being described, or describing themselves, as Corporately Socially Responsible (CSR) to them re-describing themselves as Global Corporate Citizens (GCC). I want to ask what is involved in this (self)description as ‘citizens'? Can citizenship be applied first to companies and then extended into the global arena in which they operate? When looking at the actual practices of companies that claim to be either simply socially responsible or more recently corporate citizens , there is not much difference between them. Much the same ‘content', as it were, in terms of the claims to what they are doing or should do, adheres under both titles. So is it merely a matter of words? Does it make any difference that on the one had they claim to be socially responsible or on the other to be global citizens? I will argue that this is a very significant change in terminology that is having, and will continue to have, significant affects that need to be analysed and appreciated. To explore these implications, the following analysis situates GCC in a wider framework of the progressive juridicalization and constitutionalization of the international arena more generally.

The fate of territorial engineering: mechanisms of territorial power and post-liberal forms of international governance

Does there exist a genuine threat to the continuation of a broadly liberal international (and domestic) order, driven by the re-emergence of religious and secular fundamentalisms? This paper assesses this issue in the context of, first the rise of territorial power and then its fate in a period of globalization and the revival of religious intolerance. The twin concepts of sovereign-power and bio-power are deployed to investigate the emergence of territorial engineering in the 18th century. A key feature of modern fundamentalisms is that they promote and trade-off the deterritorialization of social, political, cultural and economic activity. It is argued that this is a manifestation of a new form of ‘spiritual martial power’. The risks associated with these developments should not be over-exaggerated but they exists nonetheless. If this is the case, the problem becomes one of how to re-territorializes the activities and disputes engendered by this reappearance and re-emergence of spiritual martial power with its link to religious fundamentalism. Here the argument is that this requires a re-examination of the nature of international borders, and indeed a re-emphasis on their role, not just in respect to containing disorder and restoring the capacity for governance, but also as a way of re-configuring international toleration and of righting a wrong

International Quasi-Constitutionalism and Corporate Citizenship: Language, Troubles, Dilemmas

Why are companies increasingly adopting the language of ‘citizenship’ to describe themselves? This is the issue taken up in this article. It is suggested the claims and forms of address in respect to ‘global corporate citizenship’ are part of wider governance moves in the international system, associated with a certain constitutional terminology and moves to progressively juridicalize the international arena. The article explores the forms of these moves as regards company activity in particular, and illustrates the difficult consequences of the processes being described from the point of view of traditional international law and corporate governance

An Exploration of its Political Connections

The notion of ‘everyday life’ (EDL) has found renewed analytical purchase in recent years and has become a widely used term in explorations of social life, moving all the way from studies of the family to the financial system. But what exactly is EDL and how can we understand it? This paper undertakes a preliminary investigation into how the term has been interpreted in various literatures. There are a wide variety of analytical takes on EDL and the objective is to utilize this preliminary discussion to provide the intellectual resources to deal with its connections to politics and constitutionality in particular. Although the relationship between EDL and constitutionality might at first sight seem remote the argument is that there is an emerging constitutionalization of EDL that is heralding a potentially new form of citizenship amongst those subject to its strictures. Throughout the paper it is relationships operating in the imaginary that are stressed, contrasting this to a more normal emphasis on social relationships in the first instance

Global Citizenship: Corporate Activity in Context

Many formulations of contemporary globalization suggest that citizenship is being radically transformed by processes of transnationalism. And the business world is reacting to this sense of change by firms claiming to be ‘global corporate citizens’. But what exactly does global corporate citizenship mean and what are its implications? In this paper a preliminary response is made to these questions by situating corporate citizenship within the wider framework of constitutional debates about private economic law and the juridicalization of the international sphere more generally. The paper poses the issue of whether there is a quasi-constitutionalization of the international corporate sphere underway and the possible governance consequences of this process

Creating Credit and Rating it: New Kids on the Block in Post Crisis Global Finance

This article examines the evolution of Central Bank (CB) activity since the nancial crisis of 2007/8. e huge expansion of CBs balance sheets presents new problems of managing the unwinding of those positions as innovatory policies like quantitative easing are scaled back. is poses problems of institutional credibility and the resilience of CBs as the managers of nancial systems and of sovereign debt. A consequence of these events has been a renewed focus on exactly how sovereign risks are assessed in the new era of central bank led capitalism. e article explores the institutional reaction by the traditional credit ratings agencies and a series of new organizations that are trying to muscle in on the credit ratings business with new metrics of calculation and credit risk assessment.

What Would it Mean to be an Artisan of Finance?

This paper confronts the question of what a revitalized financial sector might look like if this were to be reconfigured so as to reproduce first an artisanal like persona for the financial analyst and craft like organizational structure for financial businesses, and secondly if this were to be re-territorialized so that it acted like a partisan rather than, as at present, like a disembedded footloose structure of ‘global finance’. Initially the analysis is pitched at a rather abstract and theoretical level – pulling together artisans, nomads and partisans and tracing their intellectual lineages. But the chapter ends with three very concrete illustrations of actual financial relations in practice that meet some of the criteria for being both artisanal and partisanal

The Political Implications of Limited Liability, Legal Personality and Citizenship

This paper investigates the legal and commercial consequences of companies being considered as both an entity and a person in law – hence the notion of ‘cyborg’ in its title. It concentrates upon legal personhood and relates this particular feature to the issue of corporate citizenship. In turn corporate citizenship provides a link to considering the political role of companies, since in claiming citizenship they are implicitly at least claiming a particular set of political rights consequent upon that status, and announcing a particular politically constrained context associated with their operational characteristics. But what would be involved in granting companies full citizenship rights in the image of natural person citizenship? The paper explores this issue in connection to the differences between corporate social responsibility and an earlier idea of the socially responsible corporation that arose in the debate between Adolph Berle and Edwin Dodd in the 1930s, focussing on the notion of ‘enterprise entity analysis’ that was posed in that debate, and which has reappeared more recently