The Morally Accountable Corporation: A Postmodern Approach to Orgainizational Responsibility

Abstract

Can we say that corporations are "morally accountable" for their actions in the same sense as are human individuals? This essay describes three rhetorical strategies used by postmodern corporations to construct social realities and obscure individual causation and control. These rhetorical strategies are decentering, deindividuation, and distanciation. Decentering is a process whereby individuals lose their sense of personal accountability as they are submerged within the corporate voice, obscuring matters of authorship, attribution, and responsibility. Deindividuation describes the process of assimilation into a corporation's symbolic reality. Distanciation is defined as the methods used to create, maintain, and alter this symbolic reality of diffused responsibility within the postmodern corporation. After examining these rhetorical strategies, it is possible to show that the postmodern corporation mediates and controls the reality of individuals; therefore, it, and not its members, should be viewed as morally accountable.he Industrial Revolution and mass media have created a new source of rhetoric: the corporation. Whereas Americans once identified themselves on the basis of family or community ties, today increasing numbers of people enter the workforce and pledge their loyalty to business and industry. Mass media allow corporations a variety of conduits for communication. As a result, messages produced by corporations are influential and inescapable.The nature of organizational rhetoric has made it difficult to determine accountability for messages and actions. Westernized concepts of accountability, gleaned from an agrarian culture, have been challenged by the growth and influence of organizational messages. One reason is that corporate communication has taken on a unique character. Use of a synecdoche such as &dquo;We at Chrysler&dquo; and &dquo;Time Warner announced today&dquo; diffuses individual responsibility for the action. We are faced with a dilemma: Should we attempt to discern which individuals within the organization are directly responsible for the message ? Or is the corporation itself to be treated as an individual actor?If we accept the former premise, we must rise to the challenge of ferreting out accountable individuals within the corporation, which often employs sophisticated and complex methods designed to stifle individual voices. If we accept the latter premise, then the traditional need for individual accountability must alter, and we must create a new basis for determining responsibility for organizational actions -one that treats the corporation as an individual rhetor. The

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