COMPLEXITY IN REGULATING MULTINATIONAL CORPORATES IN GLOBAL ERA: UNDERSTANDING THE TAXONOMY OF ‘POWER’ AND ‘CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITIES’

Abstract

Within an increasingly integrated world, the quest for global justice is turning into the single most
complex and at the same time most serious and imperative challenge of the 21st century. CSR discourse has become ubiquitous and has been instrumental in raising awareness that firms have responsibilities other than to their owners and ‘the bottom line’. Together, these interactions have entwined these strands of the “double helix” of practice and ideas, reality and theory, and shaped a
social conception of what we now consider to be “responsible corporate behavior.” This paper is an
overview of the emergence and development of the ways that businesses have both responded to
public pressures for taking on more responsibilities and, in some instances, abrogated those very
responsibilities. Corporate Responsibility has emerged as an influential treatise on the commitments
of corporations to serve the society that contract them. Enlightened leaders have since long acknowledged that corporations cannot discount the consequences to society. Making money and
creating shared value must go hand-in-hand. This paper aims to understand how we can navigate
some of the most contentious debates about the still undefined relationship between business, state
and society