Corporate Citizenship and Social Spaces in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Missing Link of Ethnicity

Abstract

This paper assesses the corporate citizenship (CC) discourse against critical political geography to deconstruct the representations of space in the corporate rhetoric on community development in postcolonial African societies. It is argued that the spaces of representation of the protagonists concerned with the development projects are rather predicated on the missing link of ethnicity which the mainstream CC discourse neglects. The findings confirm that the plant- community conflictive relation in a Ghanaian mine, owned by a North American company, stems from the disconnect between the corporate representation of space in the so-called Community Development Effort and the representations of the space by local actors from the local community under ancestral jurisdiction, the plant under corporate jurisdiction, and the district assembly under decentralized government jurisdiction. The paper concludes that ethnicity remains the structuring principle of spaces of citizenship in this typical African working ...