Running Head: CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP What Is Corporate Citizenship? This is a term that describes the role or responsibilities of the company towards the society. For the stated reason it is referred to as the corporate social responsibility. In a territory, Corporations are regarded as citizens and this is to say that they have citizen of some sort based on the legal jurisdiction. In some countries say United States companies are awarded regal rights as individuals do (Høivik, 2003). Therefore under the laws corporations are said to œartificial persons i.e. they can own their assets, sue or be sued. They are also entitled to privileges and protections of the citizenship such as freedom of speech and participation in politics. Until today corporate citizenship has also been stressed in political roles where the corporations assumes the roles of the previously governmental roles and functions or can even involved in political activities say party financing and lobbying. Corporations as Citizens Despite the fact that corporations are citizens they cannot vote in elections or hold a passport for instance they can share similar practices like paying taxes, free speech engagement or even accepting protection from the government (Scherer, 2008). But there are raising concerns that the scope of citizenship can be extended that it may infringe upon democracy and equality if the access is exceeded to the resources and substantial power. How Are Good Corporate Citizenship And Political Competence Related? Some authors have denoted corporations as political actors as they may possess political agency of some sort. There is a close relation with the idea that corporations can heavily influence politics by assuming certain functions of the government (Sancho & Luetge, 2008). The said phenomenon is popularized by some authors such as Noreena Hertz in his book The Silent Takeover where the corporate citizenship theorist are seen to focus on the gospel of global capitalism and void in global governance as seen in the developing world where they protect the human rights or accessing the basic public utilities such as clean water. Corporations are getting influential in ensuring that the rights if citizenship are respected or not. The corporation are seen to have dubbed the new corporate citizenship theory are very controversial legitimating the role of corporation to extreme extents of the traditional economic functions. However the defense to this approach is that there are no blurring boundaries between the business, government and the civil society and this challenges many our existing social sciences. References Høivik, H. W. (2003). Moral leadership in action: building and sustaining moral competence in European organizations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sancho, J. C., & Luetge, C. (2008). Corporate Citizenship, Contractarianism and Ethical Theory: On Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Scherer, A. G. (2008). Handbook of research on global corporate citizenship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.