Corporate governance involves the rules and practices that direct and control the decision-making of a corporation. The allocation of discretionary decision rights to individuals in organisations directly connects corporate governance with the principles of contributive justice. In this chapter, we start from Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice to provide a perspective on organisational justice and explore the process towards achieving contributive justice as far as determined by the patterns of corporate governance of the organisation. Specifically, we argue that just corporate decision-making needs to build on the contribution of stakeholders to the corporation. This argument is captured by a conceptualisation of justice in terms of contributive justice (see Chapter 3). The emphasis on contributive justice within corporate governance is further developed in a generalised stewardship theory as a model of governance that orients stakeholders towards advancing the collective benefit. The generalised stewardship approach to corporate governance particularly emphasises the contributive aspect of organisational participation, emphasising not only transparency and ex post accountability on the distribution of resources and outcomes but also ‘process accountability’, equity, and integrity.

This chapter advocates using contributive justice as a form of social justice in work situations as a necessary complement to distributive justice. In addition, it is argued that contributive justice fits better with the capability approach (CA) than distributive justice does. Finally, it is argued that most people are prone to prosocial behaviour under the right circumstances. Sen’s concept of freedom (central to the CA) is very compatible with contributive justice. Kulkarni’s definition of social justice as ‘equal freedom of capabilities’ is adapted to ‘equal freedom of capabilities in contribution’. Contributive justice, in combination with the CA, might provide more opportunities for an inclusive and diversified (work) environment. Additionally, contributive justice is apt to identify and cope with people with malicious intentions.