External attribution

Determining one's core responsibility and aligning one's actions accordingly is a first (systematically) necessary, but not sufficient step for a responsible and socially legitimate company. The very word "respon-sibility" refers to the intrinsic dialogical structure of the concept of responsibility. The self-attribution of one's own responsibility is therefore only one side of the coin. The other side is the company's social environment.

The external attribution of responsibility to a company results from its societal environment. This is because a company's environment is not a single or homogeneous actor. Rather, it is a structure of actors with plural and diverse values and demands. In a modern, pluralistic society in particular, the bilateral question-answer relationship that we have become familiar with in the basic structure of responsibility is multiplied and complicated. It is no longer a "prima facie" bilateral personal, but a multilateral anonymous responsibility structure. This means that numerous and different responsibilities are ascribed to the company by actors unknown to it, such as customers, interest groups, politicians and others. They form a set of claims that, that taken together, result in the external attribution of responsibility to the company. This is shown in the right half of the figure:

 Fig. 7.4: Plural external attribution of responsibility, authors’ translation, adapted from © IUW Berlin