Corporate Citizens - Public Participation in Corporate Governance

This thesis investigates the evolution of the Corporate Social Responsibility field. The field\u27s history reveals a current trend that seeks to understand how corporations are transforming into corporate citizens fundamentally responsibly for granting the public the right to participate in their governance. This participation creates a space of contestation regarding corporate behavior where actors in civil society make specific claims on the corporation. I present a framework through which we can understand this process: civil society actors form networks to bring salience to a specific claim, pressure the corporation to act, and morph into an accountability mechanism regarding enduring corporate behavior on their claim. In an initial use of this framework, I evaluate Nike, Home Depot, and Starbucks\u27 response to networks to reveal three key variables that contribute to the successful creation of this space: corporate transparency, endurance of civil society pressure, and network formalization