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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
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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

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