Scholars in management and economics widely share the assumption that business firms focus on profits only, while it is the task of the state system to provide public goods. In this view business firms are conceived of as economic actors, and governments and their state agencies are considered the only political actors. We suggest that, under the conditions of globalization, the strict division of labour between private business and nation-state governance does not hold any more. Many business firms have started to assume social and political responsibilities that go beyond legal requirements and fill the regulatory vacuum in global governance. Our review of the literature shows that there are a growing number of publications from various disciplines that propose a politicized concept of corporate social responsibility. We consider the implications of this new perspective for theorizing about the business firm, governance, and democracy.

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783834931795-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1347110-p174325274

The New Political Role of Business in a Globalized World: A Review of a New Perspective on CSR and its Implications for the Firm, Governance, and Democracy

We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and postpositivist corporate social responsibility (CSR). The former is criticized because of its instrumentalism and normative vacuity and the latter because of its relativism, foundationalism, and utopianism. We propose a new approach, based on Jurgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and we define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society.

/pdf/toward-a-political-conception-of-corporate-responsibility-yq8lzke3eu.pdf

Toward a political conception of corporate responsibility: Business and society seen from a habermasian perspective

Although empirical studies of deliberative democracy have proliferated in the past decade, too few have addressed the questions that are most significant in the normative theories. At the same time, many theorists have tended too easily to dismiss the empirical findings. More recently, some theorists and empiricists have been paying more attention to each other's work. Nevertheless, neither is likely to produce the more comprehensive understanding of deliberative democracy we need unless both develop a clearer conception of the elements of deliberation, the conflicts among those elements, and the structural relationships in deliberative systems.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.081306.070555

Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science

Democratic theorists have paid increasing attention to problems of political representation over the past two decades. Interest is driven by (a) a political landscape within which electoral representation now competes with new and informal kinds of representation; (b) interest in the fairness of electoral representation, particularly for minorities and women; (c) a renewed focus on political judgment within democratic theory; and (d) a new appreciation that participation and representation are complementary forms of citizenship. We review recent innovations within democratic theory, focusing especially on problems of fairness, constituency definition, deliberative political judgment, and new, nonelectoral forms of representation.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053006.190533

The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory

DELIBERATIVE democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power. Our assessment differs in two ways from the traditional one. First, we contend that self-interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision. Indeed, some forms of negotiation involving self-interest meet all of our criteria for ideal deliberation, in particular the criterion that in their ideal form deliberative methods eschew coercive power. We thus include such constrained self-interest and these forms of negotiation in our reformulation of the deliberative ideal, that is, the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. Second, we argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative. These nondeliberative mechanisms, such as aggregation through voting as well as fair bargaining and negotiation among cooperative antagonists, involve coercive power in their mechanisms of decision. Yet they can and must be justified deliberatively. Our ideal polity is diverse and plural. Its members both strive for

/pdf/the-place-of-self-interest-and-the-role-of-power-in-12173sd13b.pdf

Seyla Benhabib

Papers

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. by