Responsibility is more than accountability: from regulatory towards negotiated governance

ABSTRACT

This paper critically assesses the notion of responsibility and argues that by adopting a broader understanding as going beyond accountability will shift our focus from regulatory to negotiated governance. Negotiated governance emphasizes the origin of rules and regulations and their contestation over the focus on compliance and enforcement. In order to elaborate this argument, I use the case of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The paper takes departure in the governance literature. Reviewing that scholarship, I develop a typology of responsibility to first substantiate the paper's claim that responsibility is more than accountability. In a second step, I derive a taxonomy of CSR practices that are loosely associated with different meanings of responsibility. The taxonomy highlights two specific problems that the literature focusing on accountability leaves unanswered, these are the moral underpinnings of CSR and how companies take on moral agency and come to prioritize and justify their choices and the expectational context in which that happens, that is the respective community of responsibility. Taking ‘responsibility’ in the meaning of the word seriously as a normative and relational concept shifts our attention to the contested nature of what CSR means and the way how it is negotiated in such communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Regulatory and negotiated governance
• business and moral agency
• responsibility versus accountability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Antje Vetterlein is associate professor at the Department of Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Prior to coming there, she has held positions at the Universities of Oxford and Essex. She received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research is located within international political economy with particular interests in global governance, the politics of development and the relationship between economy and society focusing on political actors and practices at the transnational level and the role of ideas and norms in international politics. She has held fellowships at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (2015/16), the Centre for Advanced Study (HWK) in Delmenhorst (2012/13), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University (2006).

Notes

1 See https://www.unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/participants (accessed March 15th, 2017).

2 See Conceição-Heldt (2018) on how they apply to international organizations.

3 Causal responsibility refers to ‘how a particular outcome is generated and need not be tied to purposive action’ (Erskine, 2008, p. 2). This entails cause-effect situations where something or someone ‘caused’ a specific outcome. By contrast, moral responsibility involves the conduct of a particular action in accordance with specific moral imperatives.

4 In November 2017, a German court has decided to allow a Peruvian farmer to take RWE, a German energy company, to court as he claims that the CO₂ emissions of RWE, the biggest energy company active in the region where he lives, contributes to the melting of a glacier in the Andes which in turn endangers his house and property due to a likely flooding (see http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2017-11/klimawandel-rwe-klage-bauer-peru, accessed December 1st, 2017).

5 He further argues that positive and negative responsibility overlap with the time dimension of responsibility, that is to say that negative responsibility refers to actions in the past and positive responsibility tends to lie in the future.

6 This paragraph is mainly based on Bone (2004).

7 I use the term differently than it is often used (see e.g. Gerber & Zanetti, 1995). Collective responsibility is often used when corporate actors are addressed as we deal with a collective of individual actors that together build a corporate actor. I however refer to corporate responsibility when addressing corporate actors and collective responsibility when I refer to collectives of corporate actors. See also Lang (2015, p. 74) for a similar understanding of corporate and collective actors.