Corporate Civic Imaginaries: Exploring the Democratic Implications of Corporate Societal Governance

At the heart of debates about the division of responsibility between public and private actors is the question of who best provides those public goods that lay the foundation for good life, be they tangible goods such as schools, health services and infrastructure or intangibles such as peace, security and human rights. This is the main function of democracy; To ensure the equal access both to defining what good life is and to obtaining the public goods associated with it.
This short paper argues that the question of democracy, which more or less implicitly underpins debates concerning the division of labor between private and public institutions of governance is under-explored. As a new theoretical and methodological avenue for examining macro-level consequences of a politicized private sphere, it introduces the notion of corporate civic imaginaries. Corporate civic imaginaries are those conceptions of democracy and citizenship, which emerge from discourses of corporate societal governance and contribute to shaping the identities of citizen subjects. Civic imaginaries are important because it is citizens subjects which ultimately authorize the relative power of both public and private actors and contribute to the will-formation according to which this
power is exercised.