UNIVERSITE SAINT - ESPRIT DE KASLIK
Faculté de Gestion et des Sciences Commerciales

Corporate Governance across Ethics, Culture and Citizenship: What to give and what to expect?

Numéro de la Table numéro:2

Intitulé du cours : BUS 691

Préparé par : Elia Daniel Hakmeh

ID : 20100256

7 et 8 Avril 2014
These are just a few of many statistics that illustrate the size and scope of the problem we are dealing with when we consider the current state of civics education and citizenship in the world.
As we continue to let technology moderate our lives, we find it increasingly tempting, acceptable and preferable to trade a certain depth of knowledge for the artificial intelligence of the search engine. This is deeply political in that our overreliance on these new modes of consumption readily allow for an electorate that, while supposedly more informed and connected, can also become overconfident, easily distracted and manipulated. We risk facing a generational deficit in terms of civic awareness and personal responsibility. Polls show an alarming lack of knowledge in children and adults when it comes to even the most basic concepts related to government and citizenship. A significant portion of the adult population would most likely fail simple questions about their government regulations. Many people argue that this lack of knowledge and commitment to our core values enables dangerous patterns of hypocrisy and intolerance in society.
Two questions concerning citizenship seem most prominent.
The first arises even though some countries have officially embraced racial and gender equality in its civil rights laws, however it has not reached any consensus on how law and public policy should deal with the ongoing tough reality that distinct and in many ways unequal racial and gender identities and statuses still exist in different societies.

Because citizenship has been so pervasively shaped by racial and gender discriminations through most of U.S. and other country’s history, and because current developments are making these categories only more numerous, rather than making them go away, it is likely that the issues of how we should conceive and deal with racial and gender identities will continue, in old, new, and changing ways, to be central to citizenship throughout the 21st century as well.

The second set of citizenship issues that are likely to be prominent in the 21st century arise from a whole host of developments, including improved international transportation and communications systems, the spread of regional trade agreements, the increased potency of international non-governmental organizations, and the "war on terrorism," all often linked as features of the heightened interconnectedness labeled "globalization."

The increasing choices of private individuals to pursue work that involves living in more than one country for significant periods of time, the trans-national marriages that will follow, and the multinational offspring these marriages will produce, all will foster still-small but growing groups of individuals who wish to claim equal rights in more than one political community. The multinational corporations that hire many of these individuals may well find their own interests served by advocating for such rights for their employees. If these multiple citizenship individuals are not perceived as threats by other powerful political actors, they may prevail.

In sum, the issues facing worldwide citizenship in the 21st century are likely both to have recognizable roots in the citizenship struggles of the past and distinctive new forms in the present and future.