The 'Good Company' and Financialisation: Corporate Choices, Institutional Environment, and Catholic Social Thought

The attempt to introduce corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place in a new and different economic context increasingly dominated by finance and, above all, by a increasingly diffused ‘financial way of thinking’ on economic issues. Deregulation and globalisation have had a significant impact on the way we generally conceive economic problems. Besides the effects on structural change, we may understand this change as a shift in both rules and morality, which legitimised the adoption of a strict monetary calculation over the many immaterial and social issues implied in economic choices. Such question is particularly evident in and relevant for corporate governance. This situation is at odds with Catholic social teaching (CST). As a consequence, we will analyse financialisation in the light of CST to single out the specific difficulties. We will look in particular at the issues centred in corporate governance and at the impact that the priority of shareholder value poses for achieving ethical outcomes in economic interactions. We will argue that problems induced by financialisation cannot be solved by relying on individual initiative alone. Some form of collective action by ethically oriented persons is required to find a new coherence between rules and ethics. As a consequence, the institutional configuration of the economy is important in determining successful initiatives in corporate social responsibility (CSR).