For a long time, the notion that stakeholders other than those who legally belong to a company (executives, shareholders and employees) could take some stance regarding its activities seemed to run counter to the very idea of corporate economic freedom. This certainly did not imply that companies were dispensed from having to fulfil their duties.
The point was simply that such duties could materialize either as constraints or obligations. Constraints have always been accepted in the field of management (think about constraints associated with maxi- mizing given functions, like operational research, stock or production management, and so on). Obligations, on the other hand, have often been considered extraneous to management, both for organizations and for the persons working in them. More specifically, obligation used to be presented as something irrelevant to the assessment of an indi- vidual’s actions within an organization. The difference between obligation and constraint is the focus of Aragon’s Les Voyageurs de l’Impérial, a tale showing how daunting people find moral action, as well as their willingness to continue pursuing their own spontaneous desires as they try to cope with the exigencies of their environment.
Aragon drew a broad picture of one Mercadier, a man living half from his rents and half from his teaching job, and who is singularly focused on protecting his sense of personal tranquillity as well as his stock portfolio. The fact that his friend and colleague Mayer suffers from
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racist and anti-Semitic insults, and that many other people around him are also experiencing pain, means very little to him. In the end, however, all of these events do bring him out of his shell, forcing him to commit himself and spend time and money on advancing to other people’s well-being. Mercadier ultimately begins to see himself as a free man, one whose freedom means an absence of obligations. His moral conscience is given no chance to weigh upon his life, or to yield to all of the instincts and habits that constitute its fabric. Surfing gently on the waves of his prefabricated future or his past, he eschews all opportunities to live in the present of the world in which he finds himself.
The absence of external obligation does not at all mean, however, that Mercadier is free from all constraints. Seeking to avoid any
‘hassles’, he obeys his wife and the director of the school where he teaches, not because he wanted to please anyone or to get on with his job, but to avoid problems in his family or professional life. One need not be a great psychologist to explain (or better still, predict) Mercadier’s behaviour. An absence of obligation does not signify an absence of determinism. Mercadier’s conduct is governed by laws that are as stable as the laws of nature are. For him, water truly does run downhill.
In short, constraint can resemble an external pressure that is being exerted in an attempt to force a given behaviour upon a subject, one that s/he would not have chosen spontaneously. Necessity can be confused with a determination of our acts by forces that will be either internal or external in nature, and which will serve to generate our behaviour, thereby rendering it predictable. As for obligation, this is the feeling that one is in the presence of a duty, a morally good action that offers up its own self-representation, but which does not inevitably require fulfillment. A narrow conception of freedom would be to accept constraints and reject obligations. In this respect, management models itself after physical sciences, construing constraints as an expression of the world’s great laws, those that prevail at all times and in all places, and from which it would be absurd to try to escape. For instance, competition rules, market price-setting, union resistance and so on should all be seen as constraints that have to be accommodated. On the other hand, in this approach it might be unacceptable for a company to be held accountable for demands made for wilful reasons. In short, the emergence of a stakeholder construct corresponds to the abandonment of a naturalist model, to be replaced by an acknowledgement that companies’ actions are determined by the context in which they are immerged.
Pierre Kletz 63 Expressed differently, the idea of social corporate responsibility repre- sents the sudden advent of a Kantian approach in management sciences.
One should submit to duty for duty’s sake, and to rules for rules’ sake.
The first attribute of a duty is that it entails actions whose success may not be satisfactory to any of its executants, whether in terms of their plans or their spontaneous proclivities. In the words of William of Orange, ‘Initiative has absolutely no need of hope, like perseverance does not require success’. To rephrase an example that Kant used, it is my duty to help a drowning man, even when it is not at all certain that I will be able to save him from the danger he is facing. Kant went as far as to affirm that the goal being pursued, in this one instance saving my neighbour’s life, possesses no specific moral value. If I jump into the water because I feel friendship for him, the gesture will have some emotional meaning. But I will be doing it to preserve a life in which I am interested, because I want to continue taking walks and having conversations with him. Otherwise, ‘representing a law to oneself and turning this representation (rather than any expected outcome) into the determinant of one’s will is what creates that excellent product that we sometimes call morality’. Acting for duty’s sake is not at all the same thing as yielding to one’s own sensitivities, however good and generous they may be. It means acting in compliance with the law, such as it exists in human reasoning. Kant saw duty as a categorical imperative;
that is, an order given to someone to accomplish an act because said act contains, within itself, its own moral value. Inversely, all sensitivity- related imperatives are hypothetical in nature. Duty orders me to save my neighbor, regardless of my relations with him. Friendship or pity would produce the same external outcome, but what would happen if he and I were fighting about the borders between our two properties? In short, stakeholders create their own vehicle to remind firms of which corporate obligations have to be fulfilled. It is stakeholders’ multiple nature that ensures the differentiation of their objectives and explains why the duties they bring to companies’ attention cannot be enunci- ated in terms of any one single objective.
Traditionally, the justifications for corporate social possibility revolve around two axes:
• A managerial approach in which responsible behaviour is considered synonymous with good decision-making by the firm. Here there is a belief both in the existence of great laws that govern a moral world, and also that such laws, in line with the laws of physics, will have a definite outcome. Choosing responsibility means making the right decisions.
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• A regulationist school of thought that stresses dysfunctions in the economic and social systems and market institutions. Here the call for responsible behaviour is synonymous with the search for decisions and actions capable of generating conditions conducive to optimally functioning markets and economic institutions. What this means is that regulationists are returning to the terms of a Durkheimian approach in which firms are basically obliged to accept joint rules.
Kant explains the presence within ourselves of a categorical impera- tive by the existence of a universal ‘practical reason’. Durkheimian sociologists, however much their interpretation of the world differs from the Kantian vision, depict duty at the experiential level in a similar vein. In their opinion, guilt results neither from the contents of an act nor from the feeling that inspired it, but ‘from the fact that the act does not comply with a pre-established rule’. Moral laws must be obeyed ‘because they command and connect us to ends that are greater than ourselves’.