The Corporation as a Political Actor?

Earlier this month I addressed the 7th Politeia Forum in Milan (see my presentation here). The Forum focused on “The Corporation as a Political Actor: a New Role of Business in a Global Society” and aimed to get together researchers and representatives of business and NGO’s. Researchers included Andy Crane, Guido Palazzo, Andreas Rasche and myself. The event was sponsored by a range of businesses and NGO’s and demonstrated the different ideas people have when they talk about ‘corporate political activities’. Legal frameworks, moral obligations, practical constraints: many issues were covered. An overview of some of the presentations (including several in Italian) can be found at the website of Politeia.

To give you an impression of (some) of the issues addressed:

• Do companies have a political responsibility and if so how can it be defined?
• How can economic rationality and political responsibility be reconciled in a global word?
• What are the consequences of a political conception of corporate social responsibility for the theory of the firm?
• How can we understand the interaction of business and society on issues of CSR?
• What is the role and significance of social movements, civil society groups, and NGOs in relation to the political mandate of business?
• How do business firms try to deal with their enlarged political role (best practices)?
• What can be learned from the emerging forms of cooperation between business firms, NGOs and civil society groups (e.g. with respect to private-public-partnerships)?
• What tactics do both business organizations and societal organizations deploy and how do their counterparts respond to these tactics?
• Which organizational structures are likely to absorb the multi-stakeholder nature of interactions between business and societal actors?
• How can we organize for global corporate responsibility, particularly considering the rich interplay between public and private rule-setters?
• What does it mean to be a good (global) corporate citizen within the context of a social connection model of responsibility?
• Where are the limits of responsibility and how can it be managed along highly complex supply chain networks?
• What are the consequences of the decline of national sovereignty and the increase in the global power of business?
• How can the contributions of states, civil society organizations and business be balanced in global governance?
• How can corporate citizenship contribute to the resolution of the human rights controversies in global business?
• How can global corporate responsibility efforts be aligned with the idea of democratic accountability?
• What conditions have to be fulfilled in order to make companies and NGOs legitimate actors in global process?
• What characterizes the legitimacy of soft law process and outcomes?
• What role can existing transnational institutions play in regulatory processes?

Cybermetrics and corporate accountability

Today I’ve attended two different events that both link well to my previous blog post.

This morning I was at the VU Network Institute Conference in which attempts were made to facilitate co-operation between computer scientists and social scientists, following up on several earlier, smaller workshops (for instance on “What is data” in different disciplines). the keynote presentation was delivered by Mike Thelwall, head of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Mike demonstrated several tools to capture the rich variety of data available online that might be helpful to trace activist tactics. Ranging from cybermetrics to sentiment analyses in texts, these methods provide some potentially useful tools to trace interaction patterns between activists and corporations.

In the afternoon I attended a seminar of the Department of Political Science on Corporate Accountability with speakers from SOMO, GRI and AGCI, discussing the shaping of standards for corporate accountability and the difficulties associated with it. Seems like just another theme to address with these cybermetrics tools.

…Pondering on…