Corporate Citizens and Social Partners - Neo-Voluntarism and Soft Governance in the Making of Competitive Communities

At the time of increasing asymmetries between labour and capital in globalized capitalism, the warm symmetrical expressions “social partners” and “social dialogue” have been widely adopted, especially in the language of the European Union. At the time of the loosening spatial ties of capital, humble community-oriented concepts like “corporate citizenship” are popular in the discussion on “corporate social responsibility”. The paper will discuss these paradoxes from a historical perspective. By examining “corporate citizenship” and “social partnership”, the paper will highlight the changing relationships between the public and the private in the reshaping of the nation state as a competition state and the role of soft governance and neo-voluntarism in the regulation of globalized capitalism. For examining the contexts and meanings of those concepts of symmetry and harmony, the paper will relate and contrast them with some ideological ingredients in the making of the so called Nordic model, especially those associated with the idea of parity between labour market parties and with the concept of “created harmony”, elaborated by the Swedish social theorist and reformist Gunnar Myrdal.