The Social Construction of Moral Agency: A Communication View on the Corporation, Corporate Moral Agency, and Corporate Social Responsibility

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2019-07-11
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en
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Abstract
Scholars in the traditional debate on Corporate Moral Agency (CMA) tend to hold either that the corporation is not a moral agent, or that it is only a moral agent in a reduced, ‘weak’ sense. However, as CMA is a prerequisite for a meaningful normative account of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), such a denial or ‘weakening’ of CMA would entail a corresponding denial or weakening of normative CSR. In this paper, I theorize that this problem can be resolved by conceiving of CMA as socially constructed. Based on the notion that Communication Constitutes Organizations (CCO), I argue that, in its communication with the environment, the corporation constitutes itself and is constituted as a moral agent. Through the analysis of CSR-related communicative acts by and toward/about corporations in two cases – the Shell ‘Klimaatzaak’ and the Volkswagen ‘Diesel scandal’ – I show that the social construction of moral agency is not only theoretically sound, but also supported empirically
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen
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