Big men and business: morality, debt and the corporation A perspective by Robert J. Foster

Corporate executives today routinely admit that companies owe a debt to society over and above operating within the law. Companies, we are told, need to do more -- to give back -- even if the necessity is sometimes justified as smart business practice. In what does corporate social responsibility (CSR) consist? Any answer of course presupposes a perspective on the corporation. In the legal scholarship of the past century, two competing perspectives emerged, prompting divergent responses to the question of who owes what to whom. Anthropological analysis, however, would regard these perspectives as mutually entailing. From such a vantage point on the corporation, CSR appears elusive. Indeed, the corporation -- or, more precisely, the corporate form that separates ownership from management -- appears as an instrument for severely limiting if not completely disabling the recognition of debt relations. Adapted from the source document.