Cultivating Patriotism—A Pioneering Note on a Russian Dimension of Corporate Ethics Management

Corporate codes of conduct address various issues, some of which can be country-specific. A tentative analysis of the content of 42 codes of the leading Russian private companies implies that about a quarter of them consider patriotism, which generally matches the significant attention paid to this issue in Russian society. Of 10 companies with the biggest annual revenue, four (40%) consider patriotism in their codes. The main topics are pride in a company’s relevance to state development, initiatives, and interests, as well as care for the veterans of the World War II. The present study implies that patriotism can be an important dimension of corporate ethics management in some countries.

CONSTITUCIONALISMO CORPORATIVO: ENTRE INTERESSES, INOVAÇÃO E RISCOS

A globalização, ancorada na Quarta Revolução Tecnológica, acompanhada de suas incertezas e riscos, enfraquece os Estados nacionais e abre espaço para novos atores globais, como as corporações, gerando também novos espaços de constitucionalização social. Neste sentido, o problema do presente artigo questiona como o fragmento do constitucionalismo corporativo enfrentará os riscos criados pelas inovações tecnológicas. Assim, este artigo objetiva identificar evidências sobre a idoneidade das corporações na atuação e no desenvolvimento de seus corporate codes of conduct. Para isso, a presente pesquisa utilizará o método fenomenológico hermenêutico, com vistas a penetrar nos fenômenos e com base nas contradições percebê-los em sociedade, sendo que os métodos de procedimento utilizados no presente trabalho serão o método histórico e o comparativo. Desta forma, as reflexões começam com a análise do comportamento da sociedade na era da Quarta Revolução Industrial. Em seguida, procura-se demonstrar as tendências de uma constitucionalização social na globalização. Ao final, busca-se alertar sobre a sociedade de risco e avaliar a idoneidade do constitucionalismo corporativo. Nesse sentido, conclui-se que há evidências que os corporate codes of conduct, em função dos interesses envolvidos, podem desenvolver um “direito corrupto”.

Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains

This book examines the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility on improving labor standards in global supply chains. The book charts the development and effectiveness of corporate codes of conduct to ameliorate “sweatshop” conditions in global supply chains. This form of private voluntary regulation, spearheaded by Nike and Reebok, became necessary given the inability of third world countries to enforce their own laws and the absence of a global regulatory system for labor standards. Although private regulation programs have been adopted by other companies in many different industries, we know relatively little regarding the effectiveness of these programs because companies don't disclose information about their efforts and outcomes in regulating labor conditions in their supply chains. The book presents data from companies, multi-stakeholder institutions, and auditing firms in a comprehensive, investigative dive into the world of private voluntary regulation of labor conditions. The picture painted is wholistic and raw, but it considers several ways in which this private voluntary system can be improved to improve the lives of workers in global supply chains.

Trade Union Approaches to Global Value Chains: The Indonesian Experience

The evident failure of voluntary corporate codes of conduct and their monitoring has further intensified debates over the purchasing practices and legal accountability of transnational corporations. This article analyses the development of International Framework Agreements as an alternative approach advanced by trade unions and describes the characteristics of these instruments, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses concerning implementation and monitoring. It specifically focuses on the Indonesian Protocol on Freedom of Association, a special framework agreement concluded between Indonesian trade unions and international sportswear firms to protect freedom of association and trade union rights in the Indonesian textile, garment and footwear industries. After presenting the protocol’s content, the article discusses findings concerning the implementation and monitoring of the agreement, based on interviews conducted by the author in Indonesia between November 2018 and January 2019. It identifies several key factors that led to the successful promotion of strong trade union rights in the formation phase of the agreement, namely public awareness due to intensive campaigning around a mega sporting event, strong support from different civil society actors and the presence of a neutral facilitator. Overall, the Indonesian Protocol on Freedom of Association is an example of a bottom-up process that strengthens the signatory trade unions and thus serves as a potential model for actors in other countries.

Understanding Global Legal Pluralism

As a scholarly project, global legal pluralism has been extraordinarily successful, and it is not difficult to see why. Legal pluralists had long observed that, in any given social context, people are regulated by multiple different legal and quasi-legal regimes and that these regimes are sometimes associated with formal state law, but sometimes they are not. Global legal pluralism took that insight and applied it to the post–Cold War international and transnational arena at just the right moment. Circa 1998, international and transnational institutions were proliferating, industry standard-setting bodies and corporate codes of conduct were taking on new prominence, and the rise of online interaction meant that social life was increasingly deterritorialized and that almost any piece of electronic data or any online interaction could implicate multiple regulatory regimes. This complex web of regulatory bodies included some regimes that were state-based, some that were built and maintained by nonstate actors, some that fell within the purview of local authorities and jurisdictional entities, and some that involved international courts, tribunals, arbitral bodies, and regulatory organizations.Global legal pluralism provided scholars with a theoretical lens for conceptualizing the complex interactions among these various legal and quasi-legal entities. If authority and jurisdiction are never absolute but are instead always relative and contested, then global legal pluralism studies that contestation, sees how regulatory norms move across territorial borders, analyzes networks of influence, and tries to tease out changes in legal consciousness over time—the often unnoticed and subtle shifts in people’s taken-for-granted sense of the way things are or have to be. And, moving from the descriptive to the normative, communities drawing on the insights of global legal pluralism might sometimes affirmatively seek to create or preserve spaces for productive interaction among multiple, overlapping communities and legal systems by developing procedural mechanisms, institutions, and practices that aim to bring those communities and systems into dialogue rather than dictating norms hierarchically. Such an approach is not derived from any overarching universal set of substantive truths and does not require a commitment to particular substantive values. They only require a pragmatic willingness to engage with other possible normative systems and potentially to restrain one’s own voice for the sake of forging more workable, longer-lasting relationships and harmony among multiple communities. In this way, law becomes a forum for dialogue across difference. Thus, global legal pluralism provides a useful framework for both designing and evaluating legal institutions and procedures, separate from their substantive aims.This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of this extraordinary body of scholarly work and seeks to encourage scholars studying different substantive areas of law to use global legal pluralism as a theoretical framework that might help them to conceptualize both the descriptive and normative issues they face.

An Anthropological Reimagining of Contract in Global Value Chains: The Governance of Corporate-community Relations in the Colombian Mining Sector

This contribution introduces an ant’s rather than a bird’s eye view on the legal institution global value chains (GVCs) have become. An ant’s view makes the abstract construct of the GVC tangible but at the same time reveals its unclear boundaries – where do GVCs begin and end? The article reflects on the role of contracts and contract law in the drawing and subsequent regulation of boundaries. It takes the reader into Colombia’s globalised natural resource sector where complex contractual constructs determine the relationships between firms, the state and local communities. These contractual constructs, together with the law, corporate codes of conduct and international standards that regulate them, create close and intertwined boundaries between the firm and its societal environment. In that closeness, the mining firm assumes and voices far-reaching responsibilities for the economic and social well-being of local communities. In regard to those corporate social responsibilities, contract law could and should play a pivotal role in the societal governance of GVCs.

Transnational Economic Constitutionalism in the Varieties of Capitalism

Among the remarkable results of globalization are economic constitutions, which have emerged independently from the political constitutions of the nation-states. Against ordoliberal as well as critical theorists, who expected a uniform economic world-constitution, a fragmented meta-constitution dealing with massive constitutional conflicts has emerged. Moreover, the conflicting economic constitutions are no longer delineated by the boundaries of nation-states but by different boundaries of various transnational production regimes. The constitutional alternative for the national economies—ordoliberal economic constitution versus social-democratic economic democracy—which had been formulated by the classics of economic constitutionalism, Franz Böhm and Hugo Sinzheimer, has been replaced by the opposition in the Western Hemisphere between neocorporatist production regimes in Northern Europe and the financial-capitalist production regimes of the Anglo-American world. Against all predictions of their failure, the neocorporatist constitutions of European economies, after the financial crisis, have undergone a reorganization that resulted in their remarkable resilience. Moreover, they have developed a potential for strengthening economic democracy. In particular, public good–oriented corporate codes of conduct, which emerged in large numbers in the sweep of globalization, have contributed considerably to this potential. The codes opened, beyond the protection of workers’ rights, a new opportunity for societal actors. The oppositional power of civil society—the media, public debate, spontaneous protest, protest movements, NGOs, labor unions, intellectuals, and the professions—as well as the legal norms created by state intervention exercise such massive pressure on corporations that the latter are compelled to enact binding self-restrictions oriented to the public interest: environmental protection, antidiscrimination, human rights, product quality, consumer protection, data protection, freedom of the internet, and fair trade.

Sources of Norms, Plurality of Regulatory Systems and Moral Relativism: Explanatory Resources of Sociological Theory

The research describes the core sociological approaches to the theoretical interpretation of interrelated key issues of modern sociology of morality — the sources of the significance of multiple regulatory orders, the relations of morality and power, the role of morality as a universal intermediary in potential conflicts among regulatory systems (in particular, between state and non-state laws, professional ethics, religion, corporate codes of conduct, etc.). Based on the critical scrutiny of classical and modern approaches to the sources of norms and relations between multiple regulatory systems, in particular law and morality, the author outlines perspective directions of the theoretical interpretation of the relationship between morality and law. Using the reconstructed reasoning against the thesis of moral relativism in the social sciences recently offered by S. Lukes, the research studies the possibility of describing “moral” and “conventional” as analytically different dimensions of social norms, as well as the prospects of using the concept of “participating reactive mindsets” as a theoretical interpretation of the general source of moral emotions and judgments.