Redefining Corporate Social Responsibility in an Era of Globalization and Regulatory Hardening

Globalization and the growth of multinational enterprises (MNEs) have been accompanied by an increasing call for corporations to take responsibility for their environmental and social impacts, and for greater corporate disclosure and transparency with regard to nonfinancial risks (collectively known as corporate social responsibility or CSR). At the same time, governments have increasingly turned to mandatory obligations for formerly voluntary CSR engagement, a trend we call the legalization of CSR. This article analyzes the “hardening” and legalization of CSR, and considers what this process tells us about norms and assumptions regarding the social responsibility of firms in the United States and around the world. Through our analysis of corporate trends, regulations, and case law from the United States, European Union, China, and India, we argue that the process of legalization and redefinition of CSR through a shareholder primacy lens may, troublingly, undermine the very notion of CSR. In the face of these trends, this article concludes with a redefinition of CSR that includes an express commitment to corporations’ social and ethical responsibility to society.     

企业社会责任的制度化

面对后金融危机时代以来中国经济可持续发展的强风险导向,现代产业网络核心的企业,已经越来越难以离开与利益相关方涉及经济、环境和社会等不同要素层面的交互和嵌入。更多地承担企业社会责任,不仅成为现代企业融入产业网络的标签,而且越来越借助制度的约束力,以保证切实践行。本研究在完成专门指向"制度性要素"的国内外文献和经验整理的基础上,归纳CSR责任制度化的世界理论共识和中国难题,藉此分析中国企业社会责任制度化的现状、问题和矛盾,在此基础上,以作为中国经济发展引擎的上海地区近200家产业和信息化领域企业为调研样本,甄别和发现责任制度化的关键议题和优先顺位,进而提出当下中国企业责任制度化的多元路径实现方案。     

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Step Towards Stronger Involvement of Business in MEA Implementation?

This article explores the relationship between multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). It offers an overview of the linkages, a survey of relevant provisions of key MEAs, and a review of the relationship between global trade rules and MEAs. Finally, the article highlights three ongoing discussions with relevance to linkages between CSR and MEAs: (1) whether, and if so how, to identify minimum global business standards in the environmental sphere; (2) the rapidly evolving 'sub-theme' within the CSR agenda which addresses the business/development interface, and the contribution of business to poverty reduction, sustainable livelihoods and achieving the Millennium Development Goals; and (3) the development by the International Organization for Standardization of an international guidance standard on 'organizational social responsibility', which, if adopted, will become ISO 26000. The risk of seeing CSR as a new pathway to MEA implementation is that the role of MEAs in informing the development of minimum acceptable environmental norms of business behaviour will be 'watered down'. If MEAs are to learn from CSR, their competitors and often stronger counterparts in the international architecture – intergovernmental trade and investment arrangements – also need to be equipped not only to be sensitive to CSR, but actively to support it. ¹     

企业促进就业社会责任立法研究

促进就业是当前我们践行科学发展观、构建和谐社会的重要任务,也是企业承担社会责任的重要形式。承担促进就业的社会责任既是企业的道德义务,又是企业的法律义务,它主要体现在企业促进公平就业、促进雇员培训、促进就业稳定和促进失业人员再就业的责任等方面。我国应当加强企业促进就业责任的立法工作,促使企业更好地履行相关社会责任。     

论企业社会责任的驱动机制

作为法律要求之外的事项,企业社会责任起初乃受到社会因素和市场因素的驱动。近来,法律作为一种驱动机制正发挥着越来越大的作用。社会/市场力量和法律力量的交互作用有效推动CSR运动向前发展的过程显示,CSR运动的进展需以一个充满活力、富于自主精神的市民社会作为必要前提。对中国而言,要想促成CSR的良性发展,应该积极促进市民社会的建设。     

论公司社会责任及其规制

公司社会责任在本质上不是个严谨的法学术语,而应隶属社会学范畴,与个人社会责任相呼应,内容包括对于股东之外的、与公司密切相关的主体的社会性义务承担。公司社会责任的有无与公司本质的认定密切相关,在当前的社会环境下应维持公司的营利性本质,公司社会责任的履行须在不违营利性的框架内运转。结合对公司社会责任规制的比较法考察,我国公司社会责任规制问题的合理进路是外部引导督促与内部优化改善相结合,促使公司在接纳社会责任思想的前提下主动承担社会性的义务。     

The ethics of promulgating principles of research ethics: the problem of diversion effects

There is an important distinction between ethical standards for the conduct of research with human subjects and the ethics of promulgating principles of research ethics. Those who promulgate ethical standards for the conduct of research have an ethical responsibility to consider the consequences to which those promulgations give rise. In particular, they must consider whether their promulgations will give researchers incentives not to conduct research or not to conduct research in locales in which participants would benefit from participation. I first show how such ‘diversion effects’ are possible and then examine four principles of research ethics in that light. I then consider several objections to the argument that those who promulgate principles of research ethics should consider diversion effects.     

CONSULTANT CONDUCT IN ANTICIPATION OF A CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATION: ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DILEMMAS AND THE NEED FOR NEUTRAL PARENT EDUCATION

Mental health professionals are being retained with increasing frequency as “custody consultants” to prepare a parent for a child custody evaluation. While this practice may serve a legitimate function, no ethical guidelines clearly govern the conduct of a consultant in such circumstances. This lack of guidance has led to professional disagreement regarding the ethical implications of the practice. This ethical ambiguity is accompanied by social concern regarding the high cost of custody consulting, which has the practical effect of denying consulting services to low‐income or self‐represented litigants. This Note will describe the growing practice of custody consulting and the ethical and social unease currently associated with the practice. This Note will then propose that mandatory parent education programs be developed for parents preparing to undergo a custody evaluation. This type of educational program would provide many of the benefits of custody consulting in an ethically neutral fashion and would ensure that all parents have access to the benefits of this growing practice.     

试论“超越法律”的企业社会责任

"超越法律"的企业社会责任,是企业负担的那些超出法律强制性义务规定且符合社会价值和期望的责任,确认这种责任的法律规范实为"软法",它主要通过责任目标内化于企业的商业行为和治理结构之中,以实现企业的"自我管制";通过保护利益相关者的实质性和程序性权利,提高利益相关者的谈判抗衡力量以实现市场的自发对抗;并以声誉机制和非政府组织的作用作为责任的实施机制的补充。     

Karl Polanyi and the Problem of Corporate Social Responsibility

This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part of the projects in ‘new governance and decentred regulation’, which draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a ‘regulatory’ view of the company's social relationships. The article finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social relationships, on an unprecedented scale, with rigorous simultaneous movements for market building and social abstraction. Twenty‐first‐century market economy is defined by a capacity to contain ‘the social,’ which is thrown between the two movements, creating opportunities for companies to void the market's social limits. The article counterposes that the social that ‘returns’ after marketization needs to find its way past market‐building CSR, to constructively unshackle and redefine the framing of social conflicts that concern the corporation.     

The Molotov Milkshake: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Market

This article investigates links between the final scene—the milkshake scene—of P. T. Anderson’s film, ‘There Will Be Blood’, and a commercial advertisement for the sale of oil, which relies on a milkshake drinking analogy. The comparison probes a tension between the aspiration for capitalist economic growth and the self-regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Business figures committed to the practice of CSR struggle with the possibility that deeper, systemic forms of violence inherent in market competition supersede their attempts at installing more responsible cycles of economic exchange. A risk remains, all the while, that social and environmental concern of the kind expressed in CSR is only able to acquire ‘value’ in the market, a relational or ‘dialectical’ system of exchange, where it meets contrasting cycles or events in the market: the value of alternatives (e.g. ‘going green’) is predicated on pre-existing products or earlier cycles of marketisation. The article discusses difficulties that CSR creates in terms of making interventions and raising conflict with corporate actors, and a tendency for the system to leave inert, exposed or abandoned, those that try. The capacity of CSR to eradicate the more vicious shadow of capitalist markets is challenged in the article. There is no release, the author argues, in a concept that is so essentially dependent on market mechanisms and on competitively motivated (ex)change.     

重大事项社会稳定风险评估的法治保障研究

重大事项社会稳定风险评估机制是从源头预防和控制社会稳定风险、维护社会稳定的重要保障,开展重大事项社会稳定风险评估是建设法治政府的必然要求。在分析影响当前社会稳定的各种因素的基础上,本文认为,完善群体性事件预警机制,建立起与重大事项社会稳定风险评估相一致的法律保障制度,是实现社会良性治理的重要途径。     

《京都议定书》框架下促进我国企业履行环境责任的思考

<京都议定书>是各成员国为应对全球变暖达成温室气体减排承诺的环境协议,我国作为发展中国家在<京都议定书>谈判的第三阶段将面临减排的压力,温室气体减排主要取决于相关行业的发展和企业环境责任的承担情况.企业的环境责任作为企业承担社会责任的组成部分,在理论上刚刚兴起.培育企业环境责任意识,完善企业环境责任理论,探索企业环境责任承担相应机制以实现企业的经济效益增长与社会环境效益的双赢.     

试论非政府组织在国际环境法中的作用

非政府组织作为政府和企业以外的社会组织的第三种形式之一,在当前人类社会活动的不同领域正发挥着日益重要的作用。随着全球化不断向纵深发展,世界相互依赖的程度日益加深,我们享受着全球化带来的好处的同时,也面临着全球化环境问题的困扰。在传统的以强制力为基础的国家权威无力解决这一棘手问题时,非政府组织的作用渐趋突出,他们是国际环境法的参与者、监督者和促进者,是国际环保事业的重要组织者和参加者。     

The effect of social networking sites and absorptive capacity on SMES’ innovation performance

The combination of knowledge and innovation has become a cornerstone among knowledge and labour intensive enterprises. A growing number of enterprises are defined as knowledge intensive entrepreneurship ventures that have been widely studied in relation to their eco-system. However only few research have addressed this phenomenon to enterprises digital eco-system by adopting mainly a qualitatively approach. We point out that the relevance of the digital eco-system focusing on the role of social networking sites in relationship to innovation and knowledge. The use of social networking sites can provide a wealth of information about individuals and their networks, which can be utilised for various business purposes. It enables enterprises to create online communities and share user-created content. Within this context, enterprises actively interact with external actors such as customers, public institutions, and other businesses to acquire and absorb external knowledge, and then generate innovation. To gain insights from the global economy, 215 small to medium enterprises from different sets of global enterprises, both knowledge-intensive (e.g. management consulting, marketing and advertising, ICT and related services, legal and technical services) and labour-intensive (such as high tech and electronics, food and beverage, and consumer durables), were analysed. Via the Partial Least Square-Path Modelling the relationships between social networking sites, absorptive capacity, and innovation performance were measured. Therefore, recommendations are proffered as to what small-medium enterprises should do in order to enhance their innovativeness. The research ends with conclusions and implications to both scholars and practitioners.     

The contribution of EU public procurement law to corporate social responsibility

This article argues that while EU public procurement law increasingly allows public authorities to take environmental and social considerations into account in public purchasing decisions, it does impose limits on the possibility for authorities to incentivise corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies through public procurement. These specific limits are the result of the EU legislator's choice to endorse the Court of Justice's ordoliberal approach to public procurement law. This approach is in tension with EU CSR policy, and more broadly, the EU's non‐economic goals such as environmental protection, the fight against climate change, human rights and social policy. It reflects a normative preference for the right of undertakings to compete for a tender over the freedom of government authorities to choose a supplier on public interest grounds even if these choices are based exclusively on a legitimate public interest and should be reconsidered.     

监视理论的阐释:历史与批判视角

监视,作为一种全球普遍存在的社会现象,起源于现代资本主义形态和官僚制实践的增长。现代监视理论是资本主义企业、官僚组织、民族国家、机器式的工艺和新型社会连带发展的自然产物;后现代监视理论则是关于以科技为基础的、以身体为监视对象的、日常的和普遍存在的监视的理论。由边沁和福柯所解释的、与监狱和规诫理念相关联的全景监视范式受到新的社会现实和监视理论的挑战。以风险社会管理为背景,治理可以作为监视研究的一个新路径。     

Empty Ethics and Reasonable Responsibility: Vocabularies of Motive among Law and Business Students

Despite professional nonns of being socially responsible and providing service to the underprivileged, the attitudes of law students toward ethical duties and public service bear similarities to those of business students. Using data from multiple interviews with luw and business school students at one university, 1 find that these attitudes develop in response to the expectations of peers and professors during school experiences. Ethics courses are marginalized by the schools, and courses focus on such pragmatic issues as the professional code of conduct (law school) or how the appearance of social responsibility affects the bottom line (business school). Provided with little guidance on what they might do when they encounter real ethical dilemmas, students karn vocabularies of motive concerning how lawyers and managers should balance profits, cany out responsibilities to various stakeholders, and weigh ethical concerns, and they then moderate their own expressions of extreme self-interest or self-sacrifice. Both groups learn to maintain social responsibilities only within reason, emphasizing the separation of work from personal convictions. These elements have implications for the perfonnuwe of public service in their future careers, as well as for a scholarly understanding of professionalism.     

Risk-Taking,Recklessness and HIV Transmission: Accommodating the Reality of Sexual Transmission of HIV Within a Justifiable Approach to Criminal Liability

This paper examines the issue of justifiability of risk-taking with regard to the transmission of HIV. It considers a number of factors, such as seriousness of risk, likelihood of risk occurring, social utility of conduct involved, ability to use precautions and victim awareness of the risk and willingness to accept it, which combined help to determine whether the taking of a risk is reasonable or not. It argues that by considering the issue of justifiability in this way, it is possible to accommodate the wider social, psychological and public health realities of HIV. It further argues that a criminal law which fails to take account of such considerations is not only overly broad in its application but ultimately risks punishing those who are not in fact deserving of punishment. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft.     

Corporate Social Responsibility European Style

Abstract: The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in the official discourse of the EU in 2000. This article explains how, while CSR may have been initially an idea about the scope of the responsibility of companies towards their environment, it has now become a process in which the representatives of the business community have come to occupy the main role, and whose purpose is to promote learning among business organisations, rather than to identify the components of a regulatory framework for CSR. The central question now, therefore, is whether the so‐called ‘business case’ for CSR is strong enough, so that we may hope that the forces of market will suffice to encourage companies to behave responsibly, over and above their obligation to comply with their legal obligations. The article shows, however, that this case rests on certain presuppositions about markets and the business environment, which cannot be simply assumed, but should be affirmatively created by a regulatory framework for CSR. Following the introduction, it proceeds in four stages. First, it examines the development of CSR in the EU. Second, it offers a critical examination of the so‐called ‘business case’ for CSR, taking into account the growing diversity within the enlarged EU. It then discusses, as an alternative, what a regulatory framework for CSR could resemble, highlighting a number of initiatives which have been taken in this regard by the EU. The article finally concludes that, since the failure of the European Multi‐Stakeholder Forum on CSR in 2004, the debate has made a turn in the wrong direction, both because of the mistaken view that the establishment of a regulatory framework for CSR would threaten the competitiveness of European companies, and because of the naive (and contradictory) view that reliance on market mechanisms will suffice to ensure that corporations will seek to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts of their activities, even in circumstances where they are not legally obliged to do so.