Corporate Citizenship
The expectation that drives companies to interact with their wider communities in an ethical and socially-responsible manner. Many companies view themselves as other than citizens of the places they do business or define business as having no social or ethical responsibilities. Increasingly, however, organizations are reconciling their corporate goals with those of their stakeholders, including local communities and their customers’ values. Good corporate citizenship involves: legal compliance, employee relations, environmental performance, transparency, human rights, product stewardship, stakeholder communication, profitability, strategy integration, and community involvement.
I’m concerned with the note above that good corporate citizenship is community involvement and the lack of mention of corporate personhood and its repercussions.
While community involvement may mean a corporation providing disaster relief in Haiti, it could also mean corporations involving themselves in elections and using their financial resources to help elect officials who have the ability to change laws that benefit their bottom line at the expense of the population. I think this issue is important now more than ever, given the case of Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which overturned campaign finance laws and said, “that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money to promote or defeat candidates.”