Corporate Citizenship: Towards an extended theoretical conceptualization

Corporate citizenship (CC) has emerged as a prominent term in the management literature dealing with the social role of business. This paper critically examines the content of contemporary understandings of CC and locates them within the extant body of research dealing with business-society relations. Two conventional views of CC are catalogued – a limited view which largely equates CC with strategic philanthropy and an equivalent view which primarily conflates CC with CSR. Significant limits and redundancies are subsequently identified in these views, and the need for an extended theoretical conceptualization is highlighted. The main purpose of the paper is thus to realize a theoretically informed definition of CC that is descriptively robust and conceptually distinct from existing concepts in the literature. Specifically, the extended perspective on CC exposes the element of “citizenship” and conceptualizes CC as the administration of a bundle of individual citizenship rights – social, civil and political – conventionally granted and protected by governments. The implications of this view of CC for management theory and practice are suggested.