The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regime has consolidated as the principal normative architecture of corporate activity in Europe. Academic critique of the phenomenon has been predominantly technical—divergence among rating agencies, agency problems, and empirical ineffectiveness—ethical critique remains pending. This article advances such a critique from the convergence of three traditions: the libertarian ethics of natural law in its Rothbardian formulation; Hayekian spontaneous order theory and its economic correlate in the Austrian theories of dynamic efficiency and synergasia (Ravier); and Catholic Social Doctrine, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate. The principal conceptual contribution consists in coining the analytical category of soft collectivism to name how the ESG regime operates: it subjects the firm through conditioning rather than command, hollowing out the content of rights without altering their juridical form. The mechanics of this subjection operate through soft law, institutional isomorphism, the spiral of silence, and the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition within a state culture that Bagus's counterfactual criterion identifies as indirect coercion. The convergence between Catholic subsidiarity and Hayekian spontaneous order—two formulations of the same formal structure—yields a unanimous verdict against the ESG regime. Against the bureaucratic simulacrum of social responsibility, the article posits genuine entrepreneurial responsibility—voluntary, prudential, subsidiary, and oriented to real service—as the only coherent alternative within the converging ethical demands established by the analysis.
This article investigates the institutional challenges inherent in Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy. While Mouffe strongly critiques the depoliticization fostered by deliberative liberalism, proposing a conflictual “agonistic” citizenship instead, her work is faced with a significant gap on its implementation. Drawing on the critiques of Daniel de Mendonça and Alexandre Franco de Sá, the article argues that Mouffe’s theory suffers from an “institutional deficit”: it lacks a concrete political design to channel the passions it seeks to mobilize. Consequently, without adequate institutional containment, the agonistic distinction between “adversary” and “enemy” risks collapsing into a destructive “moral combat” characteristic of contemporary cultural wars. To resolve this dilemma, the article proposes a theoretical synthesis with the political philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. Specifically, it mobilizes Oakeshott’s distinction between Universitas (enterprise association) and Societas (civil association). The central argument is that the concept of Societas defined by adherence to non-instrumental rules of conduct (lex) rather than a substantive common purpose provides the necessary normative framework to sustain agonism. By reframing the state as a civil association, it becomes possible to house the “hot” conflict of populist demands within the “cold” structure of institutions. Ultimately, the article posits that Oakeshott’s metaphor of politics as an “endless conversation” offers the missing praxis for Mouffe’s project, ensuring that radical pluralism does not degenerate into civil fragmentation.
Julie Ann Melville· Journal of Political Science...· 0 citations
This “Against the Day” dossier discusses the destructive impact of authoritarian and neoliberal higher education policy regimes on universities but also underlines the surprising resilience of academic communities. This question is explored through the lens of surplus, which designates a constitutive excess rather than a residual remainder. It names the impossibility of reducing the university to any single regime of valuation—whether market, state, or institutional governance. As such, surplus is not only what is appropriated, but also what escapes appropriation: an irreducible excess that is continuously attempted to be appropriated and reclaimed through economic, epistemic, and commoning-based practices. More specifically, the thesis put to debate is that the violent interventions against academia are structured by two constitutive paradoxes: The first pertains to the appropriation of the epistemic and normative surplus produced within the university. The second paradox concerns the university's increasingly precarious double role as a mechanism of class reproduction and as a site of commons-based practices. Drawing on insights from Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, and Antonio Gramsci, it is argued that as the tensions play out through these paradoxes, the university becomes a prime object of political intervention in recognition of both its indispensability to and uncontrollability by the dominant political regimes.
Ceren Özselçuk, Fikret Adaman, E. Erdem· The South Atlantic Quarterly· 0 citations
This paper aims to examine how the notion of the common good has evolved within the social sciences, with a particular focus on its application in business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Although scholars often cite the concept, they frequently use it ambiguously or without critical reflection. This study clarifies those shifts and positions the common good as a unifying ethical framework to confront contemporary business and societal challenges.
This paper analyzes 1,690 Web of Science documents (1960–2022) using citation mapping and co-word analysis. This method tracks intellectual structures, thematic clusters and research trends, providing a systematic view of how continuities and transformations shape the discourse on the common good.
This paper identifies three coherent foundational clusters: virtue ethics, Catholic Social Thought and procedural/institutional ethics. Newer interpretations display greater diversity but weaker integration. Six thematic clusters expose persistent tensions between moral agency and structural equity, universal principles and contextual adaptability and ethical imperatives and instrumental outcomes. Sustainability and digital ethics emerge as promising yet underexplored frontiers. Influential works drive much of the debate, but contributions remain uneven across regions and disciplines.
Because of the chosen methodology, the study may underrepresent Global South perspectives and oversimplify complex philosophical debates.
The findings encourage organizations to adopt ethical frameworks beyond environmental, social and governance compliance and urge policymakers to balance grassroots input with institutional accountability.
This paper pioneers bibliometric methods to trace the evolution of the common good, highlighting its coherence and fragmentation and advocating revitalization through interdisciplinary and non-Western perspectives.
J. Belso-Martínez, M. López-Sánchez, Alicia Mas-Tur et al.· International Journal of Eth...· 0 citations
Social identity theory is useful for analyzing the construction of Gramscian hegemony. It is comparatively weak in an authoritarian populist regime because of its reliance upon coercion. This terror is used to control the significant minority of the public that finds the regime—with its coarse romanticism, crude stereotyping, and brutality—repugnant. The so-called developed democracies are polities that display this Gramscian hegemony, i.e., the normative habitual obedience to the authorities by the overwhelming majority of the public. The Biden administration’s focus on corruption and the so-called rules-based international order had its foundation in American post-Cold War hegemony legitimation. This legitimation claim lies in the belief that American global leadership provided the political resources for freedom and prosperity against the Soviet Union. Moscow has attempted to disrupt this system. The Biden administration’s prevailing worldview portrayed these efforts as constituting the so-called strategic corruption. It aims to undermine the global public good for Moscow’s illegitimate, parochial, imperial political gain. This worldview emphasizes the necessity of the stability of its foundational institutional order under American postwar hegemony that has expanded globally. The Trump administration functionally rejects this US domestic and international legitimation claim. It focuses on populist reactionary American nationalism for control. The perception of systemic behavior, as constituting strategic corruption, is contextually dependent. Implicit in the charge of corruption is an appeal to a desired future. Corruption is a negative normative evaluation of behavior in terms of violation of a higher order goal, e.g., public goods such as national security and self-determination.
B. DeDominicis· The International Journal of...· 0 citations
This article analyses the dynamic tension between formal and organic managerial controls as an antecedent of organizational resilience in cooperatives. Under the assumption of complementarity between the theory of social systems (TSS) and the theory of communicative action (TCA), we model the dynamics of managerial controls by reference to the notion of a cusp catastrophe. The distinctive governance principles that characterize the cooperative form are identified as theoretically generative, thereby shaping the meaning of organicity, legitimacy and communicative rationality.
The cusp technique was applied to archival research data obtained from 569 Brazilian cooperatives in the context of a panarchy framework.
A multilevel analysis revealed that the relationship between mechanicity and organicity exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern. At the extremes of the panarchical structure (i.e. the macro and micro levels), organicity predominates as a resilience factor, whereas at the meso level, a balance between these two factors must be established. In organizations that lack institutional support, mechanicity is detrimental (negative coefficient), thereby reversing the original proposition.
The results of this research demonstrate that the effectiveness of instrumental rationality (TSS) is contingent on the presence of communicative rationality (TCA) and that hierarchical support, which is evident in the panarchical remember mechanism, facilitates the employment of formal strategies that would otherwise be counterproductive in isolated organizations.
The results of this research suggest that investments in relational capital, team stability, occupational diversity and horizontal communication should precede the expansion of formal controls. Cooperative centrals that impose uniform formalization standards on affiliated cooperatives risk giving rise to coercive bureaucracy. Variance-based early warning signals provide prudential monitoring of the cooperative credit system.
The findings of this research demonstrate that cooperative identity is maintained through scale-differentiated governance mechanisms, thus suggesting that regulatory policies that impose uniform requirements may undermine the democratic and participatory foundations of cooperative organizations.
These findings reconceptualize the effective paradox described by Chenhall and Morris (1995) as a phenomenon that is contingent on the relevant organizational level and institutional support and demonstrate the applicability of the cusp model in the context of longitudinal analyses of managerial controls.
Mateus Christiano König Martins, Ilse Maria Beuren· Management Decision· 0 citations
The January 24 Decisions of 1980 and the subsequent Özal era marked a profound rupture, carrying Türkiye from an import substitution economy to an outward‐oriented, “free‐market” order. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of neoliberal governmentality, this study conducts a qualitative, interpretivist discourse analysis of Turgut Özal's official speeches, the period's press, party documents, and legal regulations: the new human type projected by neoliberal values and arabesk music as an index of changing taste. The central argument is that this cultural transformation was not a spontaneous market outcome but a governmental strategy constructed through the state's own steering interventions. The findings show that the governmental discourse of the period programmatically summoned an entrepreneurial subject along the axes of depoliticization, individualization, and consumption, whereas arabesk, passing through legitimation, marketization, emotional privatization, and identification, was reconstituted as a field of experience in which this subjectivity was rehearsed in everyday life. Despite the state's failure in its direct design, transformation through the market reveals a logic of “governing without governing,” turning culture into a functional apparatus for reproducing hegemony.