The Political Theory of Organizations and Business Ethics

Sustainability in a Society of Organisations

“…Their idea is to expose management students to moral dilemmas and help them reflect on complex situations, thereby enhancing the "moral sensitivity" of would-be managers (Brülde and Strannegård, 2007, p. 229, translated from Swedish). Among other things, students must decide to whom they are primarily responsible, or find compromises that satisfy opposing views (McMahon, 1995). But there is no obvious stance that morality itself establishes, and authors of business ethics books provide little guidance as to which 2 The question whether or not employees sympathize with anonymous colleagues in organizations to which production has been outsourced to the same extent as with colleagues whom they meet on a daily basis remains to be answered.…”

Liberal Thought in Reasoning on CSR

“…It concentrates on internal and external relationships of corporations and has been applied enthusiastically in organizational literature (Donaldson and Preston, 1995;Hill and Jones, 1992;Jones, 1995;Rowley, 1997). It permeates diverse fields such as strategy (Clarkson, 1995;Freeman, 1984;Mitchell et al, 1997), ethics (Carroll, 1989;Goodpaster, 1991;Orts and Strudler, 2002), economics (Barton et al, 1989;Cornell and Shapiro, 1987;Freeman and Evan, 1990), sociology (Moss Kanter and Brinkerhoff, 1981;Useem, 1990), legal studies (Boatright, 1996;Stein, 2001), and political theory (Gilpin, 1996;Julius, 1997;McMahon, 1995;Young, 1991). Scholars have incorporated elements of power, justice, solidarity, legitimacy, urgency and trust into the stakeholder view of the firm, trying to redefine the view of the corporation inter-subjectively as a ''system of stakeholder groups, a complex set of relationships between and among interest groups 637 Liberal Thought in Reasoning on CSR with different rights, objectives, expectations, and responsibilities'' (Clarkson, 1995).…”

Business and the Polis: What Does it Mean to See Corporations as Political Actors?

“…These ''organizational citizens'' create ties, cooperate, regulate conflicts, and coordinate their efforts through different ''political'' mechanisms of collective decision making. 9 This view of corporations as small political communities is implicit in Christopher McMahon's suggestion that the task of justifying the existence of the firm in our economic systems is analogous to the task of justifying the existence of the state (McMahon 1994(McMahon , 1995(McMahon , 2007. From this point of view, it is possible to make what Joshua Cohen calls ''parallel case arguments'' according to which it is plausible to claim that workers stand in relation to economic enterprises in a similar way as citizens stand in relation to the state.…”