Introduction: Corporate Citizenship and New Governance – The Political Role of Corporations

Abstract

(1) During the past decades the traditional clear-cut division of labor between market and state, between business and politics increasingly reaches its limits (Margolis and Walsh 2003). Traditionally, the task of the state government is to act as a rule-giver: to design and to enforce functional rules for the market economy. Within these rules, the traditional role of the company is to act as a rule-taker: to play the business game of market competition as profitably as possible. In the course of globalization, however, nation states increasingly face difficulties in providing global markets with a functional and reliable institutional framework for competition. Specifically, business firms and other market actors witness today many instances in which nation-state governance leaves the economy even with serious gaps in the (global) framework for market competition. This novel development bears two challenges for modern business firms. In public discourse as well as in the academic debate, these challenges are often connected with the concepts of “Corporate Citizenship” and “New Governance”: