Corporations have acknowledged the importance of being perceived as socially responsible. Their actions however frequently show a misalignment between image and actions, which calls for critical research on the substance of corporate sustainability. Scholars of the Critical Management Studies movement have engaged in disclosing the ‘dark side' of corporate behavior. Yet, we argue this stream of research has focused on deconstructing, and remained at distance to reflexivity and reconstruction. We conceptualize a research framework of critically performative and reflexive practices of deconstruction, reconstruction and self-reflection to advance critical research on CS, addressing shortcomings of current CS research - being overly functionalistic and instrumental - and a CMS agenda, which is often disconnected from economic constraints.
Human rights have traditionally been considered a domain of governments. The ongoing economic globalization, however, has rendered this state-centered view increasingly inadequate. In this contribution we will argue that also the powerful transnational corporations must bear more and more direct responsibility for the impact of their actions on human rights. Florian Wettstein and Sandra Waddock will first clarify the conceptual connection between existing approaches to corporate citizenship (CC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the newly emerging "business and human rights" debate. Partly in contradiction to the "traditional" view on CSR/CC as a voluntary affair for business, we will then plea for mandatory human rights standards for corporations. However, human rights obligations are not always clear-cut and evident; especially so-called positive rights often create contingent and often highly ambiguous duties for many different actors.
