Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility. Business and Society Seen From a Habermasian Perspective

We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and post-positivist 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 Jürgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society.