Citation: Arrigoni, A (2018) Exploring the “relational” link between responsibility and social ontology: Ethical, organisational, institutional dimensions of shared agency, collective responsibility, collec- tive intentionality. Journal of Global Responsibility, 10 (1). pp. 31-46. ISSN 2041-2568 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-10-2018-0047 Link to Leeds Beckett Repository record: http://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/5762/ Document Version: Article The aim of the Leeds Beckett Repository is to provide open access to our research, as required by funder policies and permitted by publishers and copyright law. The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Each thesis in the repository has been cleared where necessary by the author for third party copyright. If you would like a thesis to be removed from the repository or believe there is an issue with copyright, please contact us on [email protected]and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis.
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Citation:Arrigoni, A (2018) Exploring the “relational” link between responsibility and social ontology:Ethical, organisational, institutional dimensions of shared agency, collective responsibility, collec-tive intentionality. Journal of Global Responsibility, 10 (1). pp. 31-46. ISSN 2041-2568 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-10-2018-0047
Link to Leeds Beckett Repository record:http://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/5762/
Document Version:Article
The aim of the Leeds Beckett Repository is to provide open access to our research, as required byfunder policies and permitted by publishers and copyright law.
The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has beenchecked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Servicesteam.
We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an outputand you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on acase-by-case basis.
Each thesis in the repository has been cleared where necessary by the author for third partycopyright. If you would like a thesis to be removed from the repository or believe there is an issuewith copyright, please contact us on [email protected] and we will investigate on acase-by-case basis.
tis & Cochius, 2011) or strategic calculations of how investing in CSR can enhance/protect corpora-
te reputation and financial performance (e.g. McWilliams and Siegel 2000). In this context, it is not
surprising that - despite the importance acquired in the last 20 years by CSR and responsibility-rela-
This article is published as a position paper under the Joint Project “P.Re.Si” (2015 Programme) between 1
University of Verona (Department of Human Sciences) and Svolta srl. Accepted for publication: 11 Dec 2018. Article DOI: 10.1108/JGR-10-2018-0047. Published in Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 10 Is-sue: 1, pp. 31-46.
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ted issues - an increasing number of organizations has been caught acting irresponsibly (Gallino,
2005; Jones, Boyd, Tench, 2009; Tench, Sun, Jones 2012). It is also often understood that difficul-
ties in effective implementation of responsible actions, especially in developing countries (see for
example Abugre 2014), mainly stem from leadership weak spots (often correlated to mismanage-
ment and corruption), lack of commitment and unwillingness to allocate resources.
In other words, if it is true that ethical leadership is best understood in the context of virtues
practised in plural communities (see Robinson 2011), it is equally clear that organisational respon-
sibility implies an ethical and plural accountability, and its success is strictly connected with thema-
tic areas like shared agency, collective intentionality, collective responsibility - each of which pre-
sents specific challenges.
GOOD OLD-FASHIONED RECURRING DICHOTOMIES?
Traditionally, Western ethical theories and legal codes are based on an idea of “individual re-
sponsibility” where individuals deliberate, morally evaluate and then decide: this view informs
many contemporary CSR practises. On the other side, a “relational turn” - able to place in strong
question this monolithic idea of an isolated (and probably alienated) independently responsible in-
dividual (see for example McNamee & Gergen 1999) - can serve as a basis for opening new options
for co-constructing responsibility as a relational, circular, reflexive movement, something closer to
social capital and relational goods (Prandini 2011, 2014)
Therefore, it is not useless to remember the “classic” contrast between methodological indivi-
dualism and methodological holism (as introduced by Watkins 1952), even though to put it in terms
of a black-and-white dualism may appear tendentious (since there are only a few social scientist that
would define themselves as out-and-out individualist or holist). Indeed, there are many individuali-
sm/holism sub-debates in ethics, social sciences, anthropology, philosophy of language, social onto-
logy, etc. (Zahle, 2016), and there are good reasons to believe that the ongoing debate about the na-
ture of responsibility should translate and import these crucial issues on its own terms.
More specifically, we are under the impression that within the current CSR prevailing literature,
the individualist argument has more or less obliquely prevailed along with the neo-liberalist ideolo-
gy: as a matter of fact, the economic imaginary conflates multiple corporate prerogatives into the
ownership of shares or executives’ agency (Veldman & Willmott, 2013, p. 616).
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Hence, it is not surprising to notice - as Seabright and Kurke did (Seabright & Kurke, 1997, pp.
102) - that more than sixty years ago an interdisciplinary scholar like Kenneth Boulding pointed out
how “it is not easy to separate clearly the level of the human organism from the next level, that of
social organisations” (Boulding, 1956, p. 205). In this regard - e.g. speaking of the “ontological”
status of corporations - arguments on both sides have been developed or presented: following Sea-
bright & Kurke (1997, p. 91), we can then identify two broad positions (as explained in Donaldson,
1982). On the one hand, those maintaining a moral status to corporations claim that organisational
processes and procedures make it possible for corporations to perform intentional acts that are
ascribable to the corporation as a whole (see for example French, 1979, 1984); on the other hand,
those against assigning moral status to corporations argue that institutionalised, artificial, formal
organisations are like machines (i.e. incapable of acting on the basis of moral obligations) and only
biological, “tangible” persons have to be considered intentional agents capable of forming goals
and act accordingly (see for example Ladd, 1970 and Velasquez, 1983). This would mean that - sin-
ce corporate actions are not “reducible to” but are indeed basically “dependent on” individual ac-
tions - collectives are moral agents only in a secondary sense (Werhane, 1985).
Generally speaking, there are a number of different versions of this same simplifying dichotomic
approach that places social collectives on the one side, and individual members on the other: one of
the most well-known ones is expressed in the puzzle of the ship of Theseus (presented in Nozick
1981), where the question of “group identity” over time can be addressed either by claiming that,
holding configuration constant, the components of a group determine its identity or by maintaining
that the structural spatiotemporal continuity of a complex object determines its identity, regardless
of the replacement of its constituents.
A similar dualism is reflected in organisational theory (see Katz & Kahn, 1978), where a tension
is there between a phenomenologist approach - maintaining an individualist view that organisations
do not have a separate and autonomous ontological (and moral) status - and a structuralist approach
positing that organisations (as enduring and quite stable “patterns of behaviour”) imply a level of
analysis that transcends individuals.
If - Aristotelianly speaking - we consider excess and defect as characteristic of vice, and the
mean as typical of virtue, we cannot but recall the well-known Margaret Archer’s theoretical posi-
tion (see Archer 2000), where the “excessive” options within the structure/agency debate are formu-
lated in terms of downward conflation (“society”/structure dominates people/agents: Durkheim is
often cited as an iconic example), upward conflation (people are the “orchestrators”/architects of
society: Weber’s vision is emblematic of this approach), and central conflation - the latter blends !3
structure and agency into unspecified movements of co-constitution, precluding any sociological
observation/explanation of their relative influence (Giddens’ structurationism is typically mentio-
ned: a criticism of this argument can be found in Piironen, 2014).
As suggested by Magatti (1999), this dualistic debate is only one aspect of a far wider subject
matter, i.e. the relationship between organisation and its surrounding context, which permeates any
organisation from the inside, through firm’s constitutive elements (groups and individuals).
An individualist argument, for example, can be refuted because, if rational choice theory beco-
mes prevalent, then responsibility can be mainly seen as something (at the very most) subsidised or
incentivized on an economic basis (Coleman 1985) - since a strategic neo-liberalist approach would
be structurally unable to include and compute other aspects of human life. As a consequence, insti-
tutions may fruitfully work as unburdening devices (see Gehlen 1980) preventing individuals from
having to decide each time anew, and the exercise of responsibility would be considered to be either
too heavy a load or a superfluous activity: after all, for those at the bottom of the pyramid, it is
more and more impossible to detect those who are liable or imputable, while in turn, for those at the
top of the pyramid, it is more and more difficult to take decisions based on a more and more incom-
plete and ambiguous information. The transformation and inclusion of corporations into increasin-
gly global and complex (less and less accountable) supply chain processes dissolves responsibility
into a labyrinth, so that ultimately no one is responsible (again, “imputability” remains a problem,
see Robinson, 2009; Ricoeur 1994), and we resign ourselves to the absence of responsibility (or to
the presence of irresponsibility, see Tench, Sun, Jones, 2012) in a context a structural disorder. The-
se processes lead to a progressive “habituation”/passive adaptation to dysfunctional institutions,
leading to opportunism and annihilation of personality (Gehlen 1980, p. 51). A more managerial and
institutionalist stance could see responsibility as an integral part of economic strategy (see for
example Ackerman & Bauer 1976): since there is no such thing as an “isolate subject”, then the or-
ganisation and its environment are deliberately interconnected, integrated and, consequently, coe-
volving. Hence, in the light of these limitations, “to integrate social and environmental concerns in
their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis” - this
is CSR according to 2001 Green Paper - may seem an unsustainable challenge, or something ap-
proachable only by a small number of big “technocratic” players. Put in this terms, responsibility
seems to be a paradoxical process of exclusion generated by an inclusive systemic logic, a source of
both major systemic failures and local organisational problems.
In other words, does the future of responsibility lie in an economy artificially arranged by imper-
sonal and imposing institutions armed with big data managed by highly schooled experts at the !4
World Bank, IMF or other globalized dominant institutions? Surely, we are increasingly surrounded
by institutions replicating their values, (i.e. a taken-for-granted version of technological, economic
and human progress), and the system of science (with its peculiar methods, practises and self-eva-
luation protocols) - while it appears to be both open/inclusive and specialistic/exclusive - is at risk
of becoming a closed and indifferent techno-science, functional for the domain of institutional ap-
paratuses, with no room for the exercise of responsibility.
This is a possible reason why an institutional approach to responsibility should not cannibalize
the role of those constitutive elements (groups and individuals) which act within any organisational
context. After all, the “modern” idea of replacing character (and performed acts) with “externally
verifiable facts” (to whom rules and algorithms can be applied) is the foundation of the depersonali-
sation of managerial ethical thinking. Its main presupposition is that man is a “species” regulated by
“laws”, in which case individual action is only the single occurrence of a general function, and (sin-
ce true “decisions” would no longer be required) responsibility simply becomes a matter of rule-fol-
lowing. Institutional actions are then “rationally oriented” towards the achievement of aims, ends,
objectives or needs, and per se tend to exclude any “external” perspective inclusive of the relation-
ship between the agents and the tasks to be performed: this is why, as Bauman (1989) argues, insti-
tutions can be tools that erase responsibility, or can similarly lead to states of “externalised hetero-
nomy” that preclude any internalisation of values (Riesman 1950)
At the same time, ethical or responsibility-related problems are not merely and banally reducible
to inter-personal problems in the workplace: rather - since the existence of causal powers is a condi-
tion of existence for responsibility (both individual and collective) - how should we re-embed social
and environmental concerns into a increasingly “depersonalised” economic/financial agency?
FOUNDATIONAL ASPECTS OF THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN RESPONSIBILITY AND SOCIAL ONTOLOGY:
SHARED AGENCY, COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY,
COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
How can behaviours and actions “interlock” and - more or less effectively - produce articulated
“emergent processes of cooperation and cohesiveness”?
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A consensus has arisen about the importance of structuring processes and implementation dyna-
mics for the success of responsible practices, at different level of analysis (see Robinson 2011, p.
268): micro-level (where responsible leaders can act as role models in their work with individuals
and teams); meso-level (where contribution to organizational discussions and policy development is
at stake); macro-level (where professional bodies engage politically and ensure their voice is heard
at national and international/global forums).
As a consequence, in business ethics-focused research multiple level of analysis (and their mu-
tual interrelations) have to be taken into account: Member of the Board of Directors; CEOs; Mem-
ber of CSR working group; CSR Managers/Coordinators; employees that have the information nee-
ded and/or have a strong opinion about CSR organisational performance; employees that do not
have the information needed and/or do not have a strong opinion about CSR organisational perfor-
mance; external stakeholders.
Therefore, an interest about how groups are articulated and how “responsible” processes, projec-
ts, policies and strategies are jointly negotiated and relationally carried out - in a cooperative and
constructive way - remains crucial. The latter core issues can be defined in terms of social ontology:
a new alliance between empirical research and metaphysical and ontological enquiry about the rela-
tional/societal aspects within organisational - and within their responsibility-related political, envi-
ronmental, social, techno-environmental, legal, ethical dimensions (see Morandi, 2006) - is desira-
ble, now more than ever.
From a sociological realist point of view (as analysed in Arrigoni 2018), the way “responsibility”
is implemented within any given organisation/corporation is “a form of knowledge through which
the members […] produce a self-representation of themselves as whole” (Morandi 2017, p. 28). As
we can state about any possible social process and context, each shared representation (e.g. a com-
pany code of ethics, or a CSR report) diffuses a self-interpretation capable of influencing social
practises. This is particularly intriguing if we remember that organisational contexts and practises
are neither empirically nor cognitively accessible outside of their (symbolic) representations; no
member can perceptually experience its partaken organisation “as a whole”: nonetheless, we can
observe that - in each specific empirical relation or responsible practise - there exist a social/organi-
zational dimension, mediated by symbolic representations.
Therefore, a duality (a complementarity?) is there, between: 1) a kind of research that tries to
attain CSR objective dimension and attempts to focus on its structural coordinates; 2) a different
kind of research that takes subjective dimensions into account, and seeks to point out how - together
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with the objectivity of social phenomena - psychic (social psychology) and anthropological elemen-
ts concur (Morandi 2017, p. 26).
As for the social realm, then, social ontology can be meant to be concerned with investigating
the manner in which social phenomena depend necessarily on human interactions, and therefore can
also be concerned with the nature of such existents as social relations, corporations, communities,