This article connects the previously isolated literatures on corporate citizenship and corporate political activity to explain how firms construct political influence in the public sphere. The public engagement of firms as political actors is explored empirically through a discursive analysis of a public debate between the mining industry and the Australian government over a proposed tax. The findings show how the mining industry acted as a corporate citizen concerned about the common good. This, in turn, legitimized corporate political activity, which (...) undermined deliberation about the common good. The findings explain how the public sphere is refeudalized through corporate manipulation of deliberative processes via what we term corporate citizenspeak—simultaneously speaking as corporate citizens and for individual citizens. Corporate citizenspeak illustrates the duplicitous engagement of firms as political actors, claiming political legitimacy while subverting deliberative norms. This contributes to the theoretical development of corporations as political actors by explaining how corporate interests are aggregated to represent the common good and how corporate political activity is employed to dominate the public sphere. This has important implications for understanding how corporations undermine democratic principles. (shrink)

Digital transformations and processes of “datafication” fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of “datastructuring” which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded (...) in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes “algorithmically recognizable”, and emerges as visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which “backstage datawork” and “data sorting processes” gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering. (shrink)

Contemporary society operates beyond safe boundaries of the Earth system. Returning to a safe operating space for humanity within Earth system boundaries is a question of justice. The relevance of the economy—and thus of business—for bringing society back to a safe and just operating space highlights the importance of business ethics research for understanding the role of business in Earth system justice. In this commentary, we explore the relevance of business ethics research for understanding the crucial role of business in (...) the dynamics of the Earth system. We do so by integrating the perspectives of business ethics and system-oriented sustainability science on the basis of the theory of metabolic rift, which explains how the dynamics of capitalism result in the destruction of the natural environment. On this basis, we argue that a mutually reinforcing relationship between perpetual economic growth and profit seeking behaviour of business, which we call the _loop of unsustainability_, continually deepens the metabolic rift and keeps business from effectively contributing to Earth system justice. This perspective allows us to formulate firm-level and system-level preconditions for attaining Earth system justice, and to sketch a research agenda that links business ethics scholarship with questions of Earth system justice. (shrink)

This essay traces threads of nationalist sentiment from three different historical periods of 19th Century Britain, to pre-World War II Germany, to the United States of post-9/11, and evidences how even most noble expressions of nationalism and patriotism might be corrupted by the dominant cultural hegemonies. The term “nationalism” is frequently considered a synonym of “patriotism.” Although the terms emphasize the value of self-determination and solidarity among members of nation-states, nationalism is the governing principle that unifies disparate social entities through (...) a common national identity that is made accessible to many but not all members of the public. Patriotism is the attitudes and behaviors we exhibit within a public forum to validate our placement within national discourse. How we synchronize nationalist agendas with patriotic fervor determines our success in nation-building and in the creation of a global community responsive to needs and interests of our human condition, a condition that dwarfs and precedes all other ideologies and modes of classification. The prefigurations of culture and society predispose us toward assuming a normalized subjectivity that predicts potential patterns of behavior and attitudes in response to hegemonic domination. In seeking to refine and preserve national identity, each of these societies has embraced the replication of hegemony and situated oppositional narratives within coercive doctrines of patriotism and national unity. (shrink)