Corporations as Citizens: Political not Metaphorical

At the center of our article "Citizenship, Inc.," is a puzzle about a metaphor. Are corporations really a kind of citizen, or like citizens in some real way, or is talk of "corporate citizenship" all just a misleading metaphorical extension of the age-old concept of individual citizenship? In this reply to four very spirited responses to that article, we will not be defending our particular analysis of that metaphor so much as joining our colleagues in reflecting on the question of what academics are doing, or should be doing, when they take on the vocabulary of politics and business in this way. What can philosophers or social scientists expect to accomplish by telling fellow academics, or fellow citizens, that they should be using concepts like "corpo rate citizenship" one way rather than another? Is there a respectable methodology for shoring up this kind of advice? Or rather, are we all engaged in some kind of urbane political discourse attempting to push a vocabulary most likely to favor our own preferred ideological positions? We had relatively little to say on these ques tions in the original article, but we found many of the most interesting critiques or "friendly amendments" in the responses to be essentially about these "meta" and methodological questions (or derived from different answers to them). The title, subtitle, and opening lines of "Citizenship, Inc.," should have left little doubt that our aims in that article were at least partly subversive. In the time-honored tradition of philosophical critique?one that thrives on metaphors such as being a gadfly, or an intellectual midwife, or inducing a skeptical purge, or of awakening thinkers from dogmatic slumbers, or turning them on their heads?we did hope to stir up some controversy while also presenting plausible arguments for abandoning some past projects or presuppositions. We also tried to suggest new directions for future research, and we are delighted that most of our interlocutors have taken up this challenge (but not entirely surprised that others seemed not amused by our attempts to turn them on their heads). We summed up our principal theses and arguments in the concluding section of "Citizenship, Inc.," so we will not reiterate those points here. We would, however, like to deepen the methodological discussion our inter locutors have opened by returning to our two basic questions and to a distinction between two very different but tightly intertwined intellectual projects. We asked two questions about corporate citizenship that are clearly not as simple and straightforward as they might at first appear: