Business and Society: revisiting the issue of corporate responsibility

Abstract

This paper reconsiders corporate responsibility in the context of a naturalistic reflection on globalised complexity. By reference to original crowd-sourced data from management students and mangers in practice, it considers first the basis, and then the reality, of corporate responsibility. It challenges the reasonableness of a view of responsibility that is uniquely corporate-centred, as well as the ethics which appear to arise from neo-liberal thinking. Beyond who may be to blame for recurrent market failures, and in the face of the inherent limitations of reasonable responsibility, it reviews inchoate evidence of an emergent era of responsibility from beyond the corporation.