New Publication in the Journal of Business Ethics

An article by Iwan Alijew, PhD candidate at the University of St. Gallen, Department of Philosophy, Switzerland, and Dr. Benedikt D. S. Kapteina, Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Dresden’s International Institute (IHI) Zittau, Germany, was published in the Journal of Business Ethics on 16 May 2026.

The article, entitled The Democratic Imperative in Everyone’s Business (Ron & Singer, 2024): From Negative to Positive Corporate Obligations, engages with the normative framework developed by Amit Ron and Abraham A. Singer. Their account centers on a “concern for democracy,” which conceptualizes corporate responsibility primarily as a duty to avoid corruption and undue political influence and, more generally, as a predominantly restrictive form of democratic responsibility.

The paper first reconstructs this argument, according to which firms are primarily bound to restraint due to their institutional constitution, market incentives, and structural power asymmetries. Building on this, it develops a narrowly scoped extension within the same framework: under strictly defined conditions, firms may incur additional positive obligations, provided these are not oriented toward political goal-setting but toward sustaining the procedural and epistemic conditions of democratic agency.

A key concept introduced in the article is “democratic groundwork.” This refers to role-constrained and procedurally governed contributions aimed at safeguarding informational quality, participatory opportunities, and deliberative infrastructures, for example through educational programs, partnerships with civil society organizations, or measures that strengthen democratic information environments.

The article argues that such forms of engagement may be normatively justified under strict governance and oversight conditions. This marks a shift from pure restraint toward controlled, democratically embedded support for the institutional preconditions of democratic will-formation.

The publication contributes to debates on Corporate Political Activity (CPA) and Corporate Democratic Responsibility (CDR).

To the paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-026-06340-6