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Cosmopolitan corporate responsibilities

Cosmopolitan corporate responsibilities

Vandekerckhove, Wim ORCID: 0000-0002-0106-7915 (2010) Cosmopolitan corporate responsibilities. In: van Hooft, Stan and Vandekerckhove, Wim, (eds.) Questioning Cosmopolitanism. Studies in Global Justice (6). Springer, Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London / New York, pp. 199-209. ISBN 978-90-481-8703-4 (print) 978-90-481-8704-1 (eISBN)

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Abstract

Despite a wide consensus among cosmopolitan thinkers that multinational corporations (MNCs) have a tremendous impact on people’s live all over the world, corporations receive little attention from these thinkers when it comes to developing ‘cures’ for many of the global worries they regard those corporations to be constitutive of. This chapter starts to fill that void. Following Kuper's three tasks in distributing responsibilities, I first establish the grounds for allocating responsibilities through Gould's social ontological approach in which duties exist prior to rights and result from the claims each makes on others. I argue that claims people make on corporations are cosmopolitan in the sense that they are human aspirations of self-transformation beyond determinations of nationality, ethnicity, gender, place of birth, etc. I then attribute cosmopolitan responsibilities to corporations using a four dimensional model of the spectrum of economic activity in which the dimensions are differentiated by type of actors with whom corporations as business organizations rather than Ersatz-governments, have relationships. Finally, I contend that convincing corporate agents to fulfil their responsibilities can be pursued through the Habermasian notion of 'performative contradiction' or Risse's 'argumentative self-entrapment'.

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: [1] As well as contributing this chapter, Wim Vandekerckhove was also co-editor for the collection and jointly authored the Introduction (see also http://gala.gre.ac.uk/3941/). [2] The collection of papers stemmed from the Second International Conference of the International Global Ethics Association, held 26-28 June 2008, Melbourne, Australia. [3] Wim Vandekerckhove is co-founder of the International Global Ethics Association. [4] DOI (for the book): 10.1007/978-90-481-8704-1.
Uncontrolled Keywords: cosmopolitanism, global justice, global ethics, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, governance
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: Faculty of Business > Department of Human Resources & Organisational Behaviour
Related URLs:
Last Modified: 14 Oct 2016 09:10
URI: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/3942

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