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

Abstract

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.