The emergence of corporate citizenship: historical development and alternative perspectives

Abstract

In this chapter we provide an overview of the advent, rise, current use and future perspectives of corporate citizenship in the management literature. The purpose of our chapter then is to map out the territory of research on corporate citizenship and outline the major contestations, debates and the potential of using citizenship as a metaphor for business–society relationships. After providing a brief overview about how corporate citizenship entered the agenda in business and academia, we will analyse and critically categorize the extant use of the terminology. Based on this literature survey we will then proceed to focus on the potential for using the citizenship metaphor to provide a more expansive analysis of the political role of the corporation. This will pave the way to mapping out three fundamental approaches to apply citizenship to corporations. We argue however that such an application has to be cognizant of the facts that citizenship in itself is a dynamic concept and, moreover, that corporations play quite a substantial role in transforming contemporary notions of citizenship. We conclude our foray into corporate citizenship with a discussion of these themes and a review of future perspectives.

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