Global Business Citizenship

Concept History

The GBC framework was developed to address several problems with predecessor concepts and to offer an alternative to views of the firm as merely a nexus of contracts or a tool of capital owners' interests. GBC's principal conceptual ancestor is corporate social responsibility (CSR), the obligation of corporations to use their power wisely and to respond to societal needs. Developed in the United States from the 1960s onward, CSR was built on an assumed moral base that was never adequately articulated. The dimensions and processes of CSR were never well-defined, so businesses had little guidance in identifying or exercising social responsibilities. Furthermore, CSR was typically defined in terms of a business's responsiveness to social demands, or responsibility to particular societies, with little attention paid to a company's own core values or to real cultural differences in ethics.

GBC is also a conceptual replacement for corporate citizenship (CC). Although some scholars have attempted to define corporate citizenship as a broadbased enactment of a business organization's social and ethical obligations, the term is much more commonly used to narrowly indicate firms' voluntary participation in philanthropy and community affairs.

GBC does not view the firm as consisting solely of contracts or as a single-purpose tool for shareholder value. The GBC concept is counterposed to these perspectives in several ways: (1) GBC accepts the view from traditional organization theory that firms are entities, not fictions; (2) GBC recognizes a broad range of relationships, rights, and duties between a firm and its stakeholders; and (3) GBC requires an [Page 996]explicit, principled, comprehensive moral foundation for firm policies and practices.

Businesses as Citizens

Citizenship ordinarily defines the relationship of persons and political units. Citizenship typically involves certain protections based on rights guaranteed by the polity's legal infrastructure, often including rights to liberty and rights to protection and welfare. Citizens may also have duties; Aristotle's observation that citizens participate in taxation, governance, and defense is still largely true in modern democracies.

On three counts, nation-state citizenship for persons does not provide an adequate metaphor for companies: Can businesses be citizens in the same way that persons are? If so, what is the polity of which businesses are “global” citizens? Finally, what kinds of citizens can businesses be? GBC, thus, requires attention to and expansion of the citizenship metaphor.

First, there is considerable debate over the question of whether organizations can be citizens as humans are. The issues concern who should have what rights and duties, how organizations should participate in government, and whether businesses should be thought of as citizens in any manner, given the presumed special moral standing of human beings and the overwhelming power and influence of large organizations. The GBC framework does not assume that businesses are equal to humans in moral status or that businesses should be accorded equivalent rights. Instead, businesses are thought of as secondary citizens—a convenient status for accomplishing certain human goals.

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