Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
August 05 2009
Seminar Room A

Block that Metaphor? Personhood, Citizenship and the Corporation
Robert Foster (University of Rochester)

Should we expect corporations to act as citizens? But this metaphor begs an antecedent question: Can corporations act? While personhood is a well established domain of inquiry in anthropology, it is remarkable how little recent attention has been given to the notion of corporate legal personality. This paper reviews some of the contested jurisprudence on the subject and visits some of the related controversies about corporate social responsibility that unfolded in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. It proposes that both blocking and facilitating the metaphors of corporate citizenship and corporate personhood offer political possibilities for consumer citizenship and corporate accountability. It thus asks whether current rhetorics of corporate social responsibility, including the ascendant trope of corporate citizenship, might generate unanticipated consequences for corporate agents—indeed, put into question who counts as a corporate agent. In so doing it uses illustrations drawn from a study of The Coca-Cola Company and activism directed toward the company.