Fabian Corver

In the business ethics and management literature, it is widely recognized that corporate sustainability is a complex concept that remains strongly contested. While some scholars highlight the current utility of the concept when used contextually, others claim that new conceptual foundations must be sought in order to improve the concept. In this article, I demonstrate that these contextualist and foundationalist strategies for conceptualizing corporate sustainability both must confront the ongoing, dynamic interplay between empirical and normative theorizing. Using the requirements of practical usefulness and theoretical robustness, I consequently argue that adopting the “pure” strategy of either contextualism or foundationalism is problematic. Instead, I defend the position of conceptual pluralism by claiming that it can partially reconcile contextualist and foundationalist commitments and thereby enable a flexible, multilevel corporate sustainability framework. I conclude by highlighting the key implications of this approach to concept formation for business ethics.

Collective agency is often defended in terms of an interpretivist conception of agency. The idea is that the externally observable behavior of organized collectives is interpretable, and thus explainable, via the posits of beliefs, desires, and intentions. From this perspective, collective agents can be treated as black boxes. Just as an interpreter can ignore the brain processes of individual agents, she can disregard the inner workings of a collective agent. Here, I argue against such externalist versions of corporate interpretivism and defend an internalist alternative. My core claim is that knowledge of the intentional states of individual members involved in the internal processes of collectives should form the primary source of evidence in ascribing corporate intentional states. Hence, collective agents can be interpreted in an accurate manner only if the black box is opened.