This article analyzes the corporate citizenship (CC) practices by which multinational corporations (MNCs), which have invaded the public arena, impose new standards, forcing the collectives to retire from democratic spaces. In order to verify whether this new relationship to the law fosters the emergence of a citizenship regime for everyone, the research studies its configurations based on a MNC, hailed as a role model, in a plant in Canada and a mine in Ghana. The results, which reveal a fragile autonomy in one case and a heteronomy in the other, raise the question of effectiveness of the CC torn between economic liberalism and industrial democracy. The article concludes that, under its neoliberal posture, the CC is far from conciliating its workers’ individual aspirations for equality in their difference and their collective tendency towards homogeneity; both principles articulate liberalism and democracy but do not solve the opposition between liberal individualism and collective action, including union actions, in a flexible business in the era of economic globalization.
