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a corporation can do unacceptable things.
corporations do unacceptable things all the time.
sometimes they even concede that they do.
nike for example, in its 2005 corporate social responsibility report, said that it had hired a "team of experts" from mit (where experts come from you see) to work out the otherwise imponderable relationship between its pricing policies and the exploitation/abuse of workers in firms that participate in nike's supply chain. gee, folks, whaddya think? do you think there is a relationship between what a firm might pay for production and the policies that contractors have to put into place to meet those requirements? heavens to betsy, maybe there IS such a relationship. who'd have thought it? well, thank god there is an mit team of experts on the case. i feel better. dont you?
you can read nike's csr report at the global reporting institute's website.
since the early 1970s, mncs and later tncs have been trying to figure out how to appropriate the discourse of ethics.
they like the discourse of ethics because--well--it isnt a political discourse. the main reasons for this are: 1) the rise within business schools of this strange phenomenon known as "business ethics" (that i spent my summer writing a book about, to my ongoing horror) and (2) the dread of possible transnational institutions that might develop, of transnational law that might develop that might impose meaningful regulation on the profit generating activities of corporations (longer run) and (3) one effect of the net has been the prliferation of information sources not wholly owned by major corporations that investigate, compile and publish online information about the actions of tncs around the world. often this information is factual, and worse, it often surfaces within the smooth carefully manicured garden of corporate p.r. and can even imperil brand identity and brand allegiance. for many commodities, brand identity and brand allegiance is all there is. the importance of these features is in inverse proportion to the significance of the commodity. so nike, which would have you believe that by purchasing thier shoes, you also purchase heroic athletic potential. it is not good if this illusion gets tangled up by information about the exploitation of workers, now is it? (shorter run)
the language of ethics is useful in redressing such damage--it at once provides a way to talking about good versus bad and does so in a language that abstracts these questions from politics.
so one major reason why you get this strange ethical discourse floating about with reference to corporations is that many many corporations have adopted that language themselves.
and more and more of them are doing this, because it really is no longer possible to control information about business practices and their consequences.
so to some extent, the major corporations have brought this on themselves.
but there is another problem.
what exactly does it mean to say something or someone "is" evil?
here i almost agree superficially with ace, but the way the argument goes is not anything like what i would imagine he would agree with...but who knows? we shall see (does anyone actually read this far into these posts?)
strange thing about business ethics is that despite the fact that the field is really pretty vacant intellectually and toothless politically, despite the dire poverty of its philosophical underpinnings, despite the horrifyingly low quality of the textbooks that teach future execs about it, and despite the fact that for many year ethics audits have been confined by american corporations to human resoures departments (which has rendered them a complete joke util the last 3-4 years)--it is better that this stuff is out there than it would be if it wasnt. it is better that corporations have used this language and try to figure out how to use it to generate meaningful images of their own practices for themselves as one stakeholder community amongst many than not. it is better that corporate types fight with the real problems they have in trying to analyze their own performance using sustainability criteria than it would be if there was no pressure to do so.
can a corporation be evil?
well, is a corporation a sentient being?
does a corporation have consciousness?
another way: what does it really mean to "be" evil? is anyone essentially evil? were the people who administered the holocaust essentially evil? it would be reassuring if you could say so, wouldn't it? because that way you'd make genocide an exceptional state of affairs and the administrative conditions of possibility for it an exceptional state of affairs--when the fact is that these administrative preconditions are not exceptional and that the conditions that could enable genocide continue to exist. what if the capacity to carry out atrocities, say, is situational and not a matter of essence? what if the preconditions of what you would call evil are the compartmentalization of tasks, conformity to a bureaucratic/professional role, a bureacratic culture geared around conformity, the neutralization of ethical questions that arise about the object being administered.....these preconditions are part and parcel of bureaucratic organization in general (and contrary to the recieved wisdom of the planet limbaugh etc, there is NO distinction in this regardbetween public and private bureaucracies) and become bad or not bad depending solely on the nature of what they administer and the consequences of that administration.
if that is the case, then the notion of evil as a matter of essence is worthless, even on its own terms--and the separation of ethical from political questions is untenable as well.
i say all this because it is wrong to imagine that a corporation is simply the sum of the individuals who make it up at any given time. a corporation as a legal fiction exists across generations until it doesnt. the internal organization of a corporation persists across generations of individuals who occupy those positions. the corporate culture that establishes the rules that shape action within that bureaucracy can persist across generations of professional lives of those who make it up.
can a corporation be evil? it is not an entity endowed with consciousness--it is not in itself an ethical agent--so no. is a corporation simply the sum of its parts at any given time? no. are the individuals who occupy these positions at any point in time autonomous, free individuals who would make the same choices in their work environment as they would in their personal lives concerning ethical questions? no. does the discourse of ethics really apply to what corporations do? yes and no.
these questions are less simple than they appear.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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