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Business and the Polis: What Does it Mean to See Corporations as Political Actors?

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Abstract

This article addresses the recent call in business ethics literature for a better understanding of corporations as political actors or entities. It first gives an overview of recent attempts to examine classical issues in business ethics through a political lens. It examines different ways in which theorists with an interest in the normative analysis of business practices and institutions could find it desirable and fruitful to use a political lens. This article presents a distinction among four views of the relations between corporations and politics: corporations as distributive agents, corporations as political communities, corporate practices and policies as citizenship issues, and corporations as active participants in the political process. This article finishes with an examination of three challenges that need to be overcome by the theory of the firm as a political actor.

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  1. Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM), Montréal, QC, Canada

    Pierre-Yves Néron

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  1. Pierre-Yves Néron
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Correspondence to Pierre-Yves Néron.

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Néron, PY. Business and the Polis: What Does it Mean to See Corporations as Political Actors?. J Bus Ethics 94, 333–352 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0266-y

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