Mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility Legislation around the World: Emergent Varieties and National Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is typically assumed as a voluntary initiative rather than a legal mandate.Yet, in recent years, a growing number of countries have adopted laws that explicitly require corporations to undertake CSR.When it comes to CSR legislation, most scholars focus on mandatory disclosure.This article presents emergent varieties of CSR legislation other than mandatory disclosure and investigates the experiences of representative adopting countries.It compares and evaluates the motivation, nature, implementation, function and potential diffusion patterns of the emerging types of CSR legislation.This article shows that while the new legislative methods appear progressive, politics and the open-ended notion of CSR significantly weaken the compulsory nature of the laws.The major function of the CSR laws as they currently stand appears mostly expressive.At best, the explicit recognition of CSR in the laws may send signals about appropriate corporate behavior and reconstruct business norms that exclusively focus on profits.At worst, the laws may be political greenwashing through which politicians give symbolic importance to CSR.This article offers policy lessons and possible directions for future reform.1. See generally Alexander Dahlsrud, How Corporate Social Responsibility is Defined: An Analysis of 37 Definitions, 15 CORP.SOC.RESP.& ENVT'L.MGMT. 1 (2008) (finding that 21 of the 37 CSR definitions explicitly refer to voluntariness).2. Typing the keyword, "mandatory corporate social responsibility" with quotation marks, Google Search returned more than 15,000 results, and Google Scholar returned 832 results, as of November 2, 2020.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".