“And of course our major contribution remains to run a decent business” – Multinational enterprises in Global Governance

Although the state remains the predominant unit of analysis in many approaches, International Relations (IR) today also considers multinational enterprises as relevant actors in world politics. In fact, a dominant narrative on the role of private business in a globalized world has emerged as the core assumption of Global Governance: as state capacities to provide governance tasks diminish and civil society increasingly scrutinizes corporate actions, enterprises have become political actors and participate in the multi-level and multi-actor provision of governance functions. Given this assumption, IR research dealing with multinational enterprises appears to be focused on questions how to design new institutional arrangements and whether or not these can become effective and legitimate tools of governance. While the paper shares the view that private business increasingly participates in new modes of governance, it argues that assessing multinational enterprises in Global Governance needs to consider the meanings and beliefs held by enterprises themselves. Conceptualizing enterprises as social actors, the emergence of new corporate roles is discussed as an ambiguous and complex process in which conflicts, uncertainty and indeterminacy prevail. While the dominant IR actor image of multinational enterprises is laden with many actor assumptions inaptly imported from other disciplines (i.e. economics), an open actor perspective has the merit to capture corporate communication as the expression, (re-)negotiation and (re-)definition of what constitutes corporate actors and their appropriate scope of actions today. Understanding private business actors to be exposed to different normative expectations as well as uncertain and indeterminate decision situations, the paper thus adds to the picture of multinational enterprises in Global Governance. While the actor conceptualization is spelled out in theoretical terms, empirically two extractive enterprises and their corporate documents published in the last 15 years are analyzed.