Rethinking business regulation: from self-regulation to social control

This paper examines contemporary aspects of business regulation associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) with a view to understanding its considerable influence in business, civil society, governmental and multilateral circles. It also aims at assessing the potential of CSR business regulations to counter the perverse effects of economic liberalisation and corporate-led globalisation, and reassert social control over markets.

The paper highlights that:

• both private and non-governmental authority have been playing an increasing role in the social regulation of business
• the CSR agenda has evolved to embrace a broader range of issues and practices
• there has been a gradual hardening of regulatory approaches, from softer voluntary initiatives that characterised corporate self-regulation to co-regulation and multi-stakeholder initiatives
• more recently there has been a renewed attention to legalistic approaches within the emerging corporate accountability agenda
• there is a potential for regulating business through forms of "articulated regulation", a term used to refer to the coming together of different regulatory approaches in ways that are complementary and synergistic, or less contradictory
• four forms of articulated regulation are identified; they include complementarity between different non-governmental regulatory systems, the interface between confrontational and collaborationist forms of civil society activism, linkages between voluntary and legalistic approaches or public policy, and greater policy coherence at both the micro level of the firm and the macro level of government and international policy
• broad generalisations about the future trajectory of CSR and corporate accountability should be treated with caution as outcomes are likely to vary considerably in different enterprise, industrial, societal and capitalist settings
• while the mainstream CSR agenda has amassed considerable political momentum, its proponents generally ignore the extent to which the scaling-up and deepening of CSR confronts a contradictory macroeconomic environment.