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

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