Educating for Sustainability and Semiotically Figuring the Corporation as a Citizen: A Case Study

Contemporary corporations headquartered in the U.S.A. are incre-asingly seeking to reconfigure themselves as corporate citizens. Using ethnographic data gathered from a corporation in Hawaii, this paper examines anthropologically how a corporation called "H-LC" sought to express corporate citizenship and figure itself as a corporate citizen by engaging in education for sustainability. By partnering with a local college, the HLC Company cofounded the "S-ustainability Education Institute" (a pseudonym) and created various educational programs and cultural practices that promoted sustaina-bility as a locally meaningful and inhabitable sign of cultural citize-nship. In educating sustainability and making it a locally recogniza-ble mode of performing citizenship, the HLC Company, in turn, cre-ated the grounds of which the corporation could narrate itself as no longer a legal fiction but a ‘corporate citizen’, which belongs to an actual community of sustainability-conscious social actors. It is ar-gued that it is only through the creation and circulation of meanin-gful signs of citizenship that corporate entities can semiotically co-nfigure themselves as corporate citizens and legitimize their citizen-ship claims in corporate narratives and discourses.