Responsibility Theory: Examining the Political-Social Role of Multinational Corporations Through the Lens of Power and Ability

The appropriate role of corporations in society is heavily debated, especially in instances when their activities extend beyond commerce into the political arena. Within the academic field of business, Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) is the main body of literature which examines the frequently blurred border between private and public spheres. Against a backdrop of globalization, PCSR explores how corporations engage in traditionally governmental roles (like the provision of public goods) - framing rising corporate power and ability as a valid basis for responsible political-social intervention in the face of weakened state capacities (e.g., Scherer and Palazzo, 2007; 2008; 2011; Scherer et al., 2016). While a number of critiques question specific elements within this perspective - highlighting weak points to be rethought (e.g., Whelan, 2012; Schrempf-Stirling, 2018), there is also a strand of literature which fundamentally rejects PCSR in its entirety - warning of its dangers to democracy by allowing unelected, self-interested multinationals to decide how to label and solve major global problems, ultimately consolidating their powers further (e.g., Azizi, 2020; Rhodes and Fleming, 2020).
This debate about PCSR's overall merit (i.e., whether it is essentially good or bad) is not a disagreement about whether corporations do take on political-social roles; at its core, it is a normative question about whether they should. Though often opaque and ill-defined, the concepts of power and ability are omnipresent in the dispute (e.g., Scherer and Palazzo, 2007; Scherer, Baumann-Pauly, and Schneider, 2013; Rhodes and Fleming, 2020), which hinges largely on different implicit assumptions about these terms and their relationship to responsibility in the corporate/state context. While proponents presume a positive relationship with responsibility (i.e., that corporate power/ability implies corporate responsibility to engage in political-social activity), opponents presume a negative relationship (i.e., that corporate power/ability implies corporate responsibility not to engage in political-social activity).
Despite this significant underlying conflict, these vastly different ideas about the relationship between power, ability, and responsibility are not directly addressed, analyzed, or substantiated by either side - leaving arguments incomplete and the dialog stalled. This research engages with these concepts (first through a more robust exploration of their meanings and then through an analysis of how they are related to one another in both the corporate and state context) as a means to resolve divergent assumptions and advance the discussion on the appropriate political-social role of multinationals. This is accomplished through conceptual analysis (supported by thought experiments and descriptive hypotheticals) and normative theorizing (supplemented with coherence theory), with no collection of primary qualitative or quantitative data.