Lecture 4 - Political approaches to corporate sustainability

Question 1

Political CSR and the idea of corporate citizenship. What are 2 argument of the literature?

Answer 1

1. Corporations and MNCs do and should increasingly play a key role in the provision of global public goods
   - as globalization results in states suffering from loss of power
2. Corporations can and should participate within multi-stakeholder initiatives or international accountability standards
   -to better ensure that their policies and practices are democratically legitimate

Question 2

Mention the 3 central aspects to political CSR literature

Answer 2

1. Governance gaps
2. MSIs
3. Democracy

Question 3

Ruggie: Governance gaps

1. What is it?
2. What does it tell us?
3. What does it suggest?

Answer 3

1. A regulatory vacuum between scope and impact of economic forces and the actors and capacities of the societies that manage their consequence
2. That MNC policies and practices is not always subject to any sort of meaningful regulation or democratic legitimization
3. The need for MNCs to increasingly provide for a variety of global public goods that have predominately associated with the national governments

Question 4

Mention 3 critique points of MSIs

Answer 4

1. Enabling MNCs to avoid meaningful responsibility
2. Being limited by a neo-liberal rather than embedded liberal global order
3. Enabling of neo-liberal global order of trade and finance with MSIs can reduce the perceived need for more state-enforced rules and regulations

Question 5

What is a key purpose of MSIs and how can this be hard to fulfill (3)?

Answer 5

• To democratize the governance of multinational corporations

1) Private investors want a return
2) Non-democratic countries are major financers
3) The impossibility of all individuals participating when they have such different interests in the matter

Question 6

Mention 3 aspects of democratic corporate governance and what is relevant to think about

Answer 6

1) Participation
-Is anyone missing? Same opportunities to be heard?

2) Accountability
-Who is assessing compliance? Can companies buy certification?

3) Deliberation - (discussions, concensus-building - based on broad inputs)
-Can the interest of all stakeholders be aligned in win-win scenarios?

Question 7

Mention 3 arguments concerning if democratic corporate governance structures should be developed

Answer 7

1) Political CSR litteratur
-Could help fill governance gaps
-Enable citizens of the world to transcend national borders and participate in the democratic determination of policies of globally influential corporate actors

2) JürgenHabermas
-Would undermine the functional differentiation of contemporary modern, Western societies
-Would be pale in comparison to the (cosmopolitan) democracy enabled by existing state institutions

3) John Rawls
- Democratic principles in MSIs may not be liked by everyone
-The broad principles of political justice that apply to democratic state organizations should not be directly applied to all organizations