“It’s not me, it’s the corporation”: the value of corporate accountability in the global political economy

Abstract

Corporate accountability (CA) legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value extraction. Accountability struggles effectively to reduce corporate capitalism’s violence to the good corporate citizen’s occasional ‘wrongdoing’, which becomes a calculable risk capable of being exchanged—signifying ‘planned impunity’. CA, though a seemingly emancipatory process, thus exemplifies law’s constitutive role in capitalism and the need to move beyond law for emancipation.