The Company as a Good Citizen: Institutional Responsibility and Cosmopolitanism

The market requires more focus on responsibility and business ethics. This article discusses the vision of the business company as a responsible company with focus on good corporate citizenship as an expression of the limits of the market with regard to social responsibility and values of business organizations. This includes discussion of the challenges of business legitimacy in a global society. These must also be seen in the relation between economics and religion. Social, spiritual and cultural values lie behind the search for business legitimacy and the republican conception of corporate citizenship, and this is also an expression of ethical values at the limits of economic rationality. But cosmopolitan business ethics can be criticized for moralizing the market so we move from economic religion to moral economy forgetting the importance of economic rationality.