Corporations as Political Animals: Citizenship Traditions and Corporate Citizenship in the US, UK and Germany

Traditions of understanding the nature, rights and obligations of citizenship are generally viewed as applying to individuals. Can they also be used to explain the beliefs and behavior of corporations? Indeed while ‘corporate citizenship’ is used widely to describe firm activity that benefits the public, what that term means - and entails - varies widely, especially between Europe and the United States. Contrasting traditions of understanding the nature and obligations of citizenship itself may provide some clues to these differing ideas and practices. They may also shape populist pressures on corporations that claim to operate as good ‘corporate citizens.’ In addition, traditions of citizenship can help illuminate and explain the considerable variation in corporate citizenship ideals and practices across corporations with roots in the US, UK and Germany, i.e. ‘why home country matters.’ The paper offers a comparative theoretical framework for understanding the practice of corporate citizenship supported by extensive empirical evidence from major corporations in three western countries. The paper begins with a discussion of the role of traditions and the nature of contrasting political traditions of citizenship. It explores the distinct characteristics and implications of the civic republican tradition, the liberal tradition and the social democratic ‘social rights’ tradition for understanding how ‘corporate citizenship’ is conceived and practiced. Footprints of these traditions can then be identified in the ways in which corporations in different regions represent their corporate ideals and practices. The study uses a content analysis of the themes and language employed by 150 large firms in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany in their corporate communications, to probe the proposed framework empirically. Specifically, we examine the CEO/management statements opening the CSR reports of the 50 largest firms in each country at four points in time: 1995-99, 2007-8 , 2012-13 and 2022-23. Our content analysis focuses on firm motivations for engaging in corporate social responsibility, CSR norms and priorities as well as stakeholders identified in these documents. In addition, we employ a supplemental thematic analysis of key words and textual exerts indicative of particular citizenship traditions. The content analysis of the CEO/management letters demonstrates some striking and resilient differences in the motivations, focus and overall understanding of corporate citizenship across countries. The particular shape of these differences is more coherent when understood as reflecting different traditions of citizenship. US firms are more likely to follow a civic republican model, emphasizing responsibility to community, especially the home community of their corporate headquarters, with a lesser and declining focus on market motivations and little explicit interest in codes of practice. Firms in the UK are more classically liberal in their understanding of corporate citizenship, led by the ‘business case’ and focusing on strategic considerations and key stakeholders. In Germany corporate citizenship was more likely to focus on labor and human rights and be exemplified via participation in international collective agreements and codes of practice.