Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Sandrine BLANC

Committees multiply in firms, whether ethics or stakeholders committees, multi-stakeholders initiatives, or a recently established ‘Supreme Court’ at Facebook. These arrangements aim to organise and legitimise the social activities of corporations. This article raises the question of the appropriate form of such governance structures. The examples above illustrate three possible ways of legitimizing corporate social actions: deliberation within the company, deliberation outside and an approach we label corporate constitutionalism. While the first two models have been tested in practice and assessed in theory at some length, the third one is comparatively more recent, both in practice and in theory. This article focuses on the latter model and asks whether corporate constitutionalism is more appropriate for legitimizing corporate social action than deliberation (with or within firms). It examines the respective merits and justification of deliberative democracy and constitutional democracy as theoretical models for legitimatising corporate social actions.