ABSTRACT. This paper traces the development of
corporate citizenship as a way of framing business and
society relations, and critically examines the content
of contemporary understandings of the term. These
conventional views of corporate citizenship are argued
to contribute little or nothing to existing notions of
corporate social responsibility and corporate philan-
thropy. The paper then proposes a new direction,
which particularly exposes the element of “citizen-
ship”. Being a political concept, citizenship can only
be reasonably understood from that theoretical angle.
This suggests that citizenship consists of a bundle of
rights conventionally granted and protected by gov-
ernments of states. However, the more that govern-
mental power and sovereignty have come under
threat, the more that relevant political functions have
gradually shifted towards the corporate sphere – and
it is at this point where “corporate” involvement
into “citizenship” becomes an issue. Consequently,
“corporate citizens” are substantially more than fellow
members of the same community who cosily rub
shoulders with other fellow citizens while bravely
respecting those other citizens’ rights and living up to
their own responsibility as corporations – as the
conventional rhetoric wants us to believe. Behind this
relatively innocuous mask then, the true face of
corporate citizenship suggests that the corporate role
in contemporary citizenship is far more profound, and
ultimately in need of urgent reappraisal.
KEY WORDS: business and government, corporate
citizenship, corporate social responsibility, globaliza-
tion, human rights, stakeholder theory
1. Introduction
This paper critically examines the rise and the
content of the term corporate citizenship (CC),
and asks how far it really embodies a new
concept or new ideas. We first discuss the emer-
gence of CC as new way of framing business-
society relations, and outline two common
perspectives on CC in the extant literature. We
then develop a third, extended view of the
concept that starts from the “citizenship” element
of CC. We argue that, apart from one or two
exceptions (e.g. Wood and Logsdon, 2001), this
has been largely ignored in the still growing body
of literature. Hence, starting from this notion of
citizenship, we develop a conceptual framework
for CC that reflects the shifting role of corpora-
tions in society during the last decade, and ulti-
mately conceptualises a political role for the
corporation in society. We suggest, however, that
the face of current conceptions of CC as found
in the literature, and as expressed by corporations
and consultants, may actually serve to obscure
this new role for the corporation, and in so far
as new institutional arrangements are masked by
this terminology, preclude a critical examination
of business-society relations.
2. Corporate citizenship in context:
2. Conceptual frameworks for
2. business-society relations
As CC represents a progression within a longer
tradition in conceptualising business and society
relations, it is important to first examine the
legacy of these concepts. The most popular
concept to date, and essentially the building
Behind the Mask:
Revealing the True Face
of Corporate Citizenship
Journal of Business Ethics 45: 109–120, 2003.
© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Dirk Matten is a Senior Research Fellow at the
International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
(ICCSR) at the Nottingham University Business
School. Andrew Crane is a Senior Lecturer in Business
Ethics at ICCSR and Wendy Chapple is the Deputy
Director of ICCSR.
Dirk Matten
Andrew Crane
Wendy Chapple