Dis-Incorporating Corporate Social Responsibility

This work aims at demarcating the starting line by answering the question of whether, in today’s transnational law, a corporation can already be considered as socially responsible or whether corporate law has to be changed in order to make the transnational corporation (at least from a legal perspective) per definition a socially responsible economic organization. In order to perform this investigation and forward certain normative proposals, this work starts by sketching the situation concerning corporate social responsibility in the transnational context, in particular in relation to the regulation of corporate governance. In particular it denotes one particular aspect that needs to be taken into consideration when dealing with transnational law in general: the latter is based more on legal principles to be weighed against each other than on specific and “either-or” rules. This particular feature of transnational law is fundamental in order to understand where and in which forms the normative proposals as to the corporate social responsibility for multinational corporations are going to have to operate. This work then offers to legal actors possible strategies in order to insert the idea of corporate social responsibility as a necessary legal requirement for an economic organization to be called as corporation. Once the best strategy is identified, i.e. a mixture of hard and soft law measures, the final part of the work proceeds in offering an example of how to introduce the interests of others than shareholders in the very core of the regulation of corporate governance, namely through the figure of an in-house corporate ombudsperson.

The working paper 'Dis-Incorporating Corporate Social Responsibility' can be found here.