Abstract
There is an established body of politically informed scholarly work that offers a sustained critique of how corporate business ethics is a form of organizing that acts as a subterfuge to facilitate the expansion of corporate sovereignty. This paper contributes to that work by using its critique as the basis for theorizing an alternative form of ethics for corporations. Using the case of the 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal as an illustrative example, the paper theorizes an ethics that locates corporations in the democratic sphere so as to defy their professed ability to organize ethics in a self-sufficient and autonomous manner. The Volkswagen scandal shows how established organizational practices of corporate business ethics are no barrier to, and can even serve to enable, the rampant pursuit of business self-interest through well-orchestrated and large-scale conspiracies involving lying, cheating, fraud and lawlessness. The case also shows how society, represented by individuals and institutions, is able to effectively resist such corporate malfeasance. The ‘democratic business ethics’ that this epitomizes is one where civil society holds corporations to account for their actions, and in so doing disrupts corporate sovereignty. This ethics finds practical purchase in forms of dissent that redirect power away from centres of organized wealth and capital, returning it to its democratically rightful place with the people, with society.
Highlights
Everything was going so well for The Volkswagen Group
It is a mode of disturbance that would question, undermine and disrupt the pretentious authority of any such position; it is a ‘politics of the trace, a politics of disturbance’ (Caygill, 2002: 138, see Abenour, 2002). This is what happened to Volkswagen during the emission scandal: its falsely assumed position of sovereignty and ethical self-sufficiency was brought into question and disturbed, leading eventually to the corporation being held to public account for the actions taken in its name
One might well wonder what is left of democracy in a world where ‘giant corporations are acquiring a political and social capacity beyond the reach of governments’ (Crouch, 2011: 137)
Summary
Everything was going so well for The Volkswagen Group. In mid-2015 it overtook the Toyota Motor Corporation as the biggest auto manufacturer in the world. Today’s corporations are enjoined to design and implement an ‘organization of ethics’ which claims to regulate ethical behaviour and enact social responsibility while ‘yielding significant returns’ in terms of profit maximization (Metzger, Dalton and Hill, 1993: 35) and strengthening the role of the market relations (Kinderman 2012) This is an explicit strategy that corporate managers exude pride about. It manifests in political acts that render corporations vulnerable through a politics that contests both their putative morality and the deleterious effects of the exercise of their increasingly sovereign power This ethics finds practical purchase as a form of radical democratic dissent and resistance that redirects power away from centres of organized wealth and capital, returning it to its democratically rightful place with the people, with society. The paper concludes by asserting the need to rescue business ethics from corporate sovereignty, and to reimagine it on democratic terms
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