Grad - Hao

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, community stakeholder consultation, values-driven leadership, and ethical outsourcing have become curious keywords in contemporary transnational capitalism  Milton Friedman's now outdated dictate that "the business of business is business," requiring that enterprises only seek profit-maximization, no longer tracks contemporary economic practices: today any significant corporate organization with global affiliations are expected to meet, through self-governance, certain normative criteria deemed “ethical.” By tacking between ethnographic engagements and concept development, this paper will consider how regimes of business ethics are creating ethical spaces of exception in the complex relation between two Asian locales that stand as touchstones for global capitalism more broadly: China and Singapore. If skeptics of a robust possibility for ethical capitalism have pointed to the “race to the bottom,” in which corporations seek the most lenient constraints possible, proponents have advanced the “race to the top,” in which enterprises seek to maximize moral, as well as shareholder, value. China has often been taken as a site of the first, and nearby post-independence Singapore a case of the second. Drawing from extended fieldwork with corporate managers in both nations, this paper will consider how contemporary elite actors are conceptualizing and actively reshaping sovereignty and citizenship through ethical enterprise. I ask: How are particular ethical niches for business carved out from the ostensible moral and regulatory unity of the nation-state, its citizens, and ultimately, normative values? From Singapore’s carefully cultivated “ethical population” to China’s development of green cities, the private sector is self-reflexively reshaping citizenship and territory to produce zones of unique ethical weight. But, we may ask, are these techniques merely a deployment of seemingly ethical concerns for corporate ends or is the very face of moral life being remade through these mechanisms? If we are to begin to take ethical corporate actors seriously, one way is to consider their flexible engagement with ethical exceptions.