Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T07:24:54.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Mind the Agency Gap in Corporate Social Responsibility

from Part II - Transnational Attribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 February 2024

Melissa J. Durkee
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Get access

Summary

The debate over whether corporate social responsibility should comprise soft law responsibility or legally binding obligations is inadequate to address the legal relationship between corporations and society. The corporate social responsibility movement addresses only an economic agency problem and overlooks a fundamental gap between economic agency and legal agency, or attribution. The former is the problem of potential divergence of interests between a principal and an agent, and the latter concerns the laws regulating the relationship between a person and his or her representative. Corporate social responsibility is meant to respond to the first of these— – the economic agency problem – —as scholars have analyzed at length. However, the legal structures needed to address attribution and legal accountability are still far from established. The chapter proposes an attribution framework that can appropriately address the legal agency problem, in other words, to address corporate social accountability. It suggests that creating a new form of fictitious legal entity could help address this problem by resolving collective action issues.

Type
Chapter
Information
States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions
Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities
, pp. 151 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×