Corporations as Governance Actors: From Behemoths in the Shadows to Corporate Citizens

On the premise is that corporations are vital to societal governance but that their roles – of commission and of omission, positive and negative – this paper investigates and addresses the poor understanding of these roles in the management and business literature. We propose and apply a framework to capture the range of ways in which corporations ‘take and make’ societal governance, defined as the spheres of public policy and private regulation, and in so doing reveal latent elements of governance breaking. The state of blindness concerning corporations’ governance roles is compounded as we unfold three systemic pathologies of corporations and governance: 1) corporations’ overt and covert governance contributions; 2) governance issues arising from corporations’ cross-border strategies; and 3) corporate strategies to ‘fissure’ their organizations in relation to their governance contexts. These reveal that corporations, like the behemoth, have great strength and capacity (to contribute to societal governance) but are also elusive, diffident and subversive (in relation to societal governance). We note several diagnoses and remedies that have been offered to address some of the pathologies of corporations’ governance roles, but also note that these generally reflect only a limited understanding of the full shape and nature of corporations. We build on the concept of corporate citizenship as a means of capturing the fullness of corporations’ governance roles as well as outlining normative expectations as to how these should play out.