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Sabapathy, John --- "In the Dark All Cats are Grey: Corporate Responsibility and Legal Responsibility" [2005] ELECD 207; in Tully, Stephen (ed), "Research Handbook on Corporate Legal Responsibility" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Research Handbook on Corporate Legal Responsibility

Editor(s): Tully, Stephen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843768203

Section: Chapter 13

Section Title: In the Dark All Cats are Grey: Corporate Responsibility and Legal Responsibility

Author(s): Sabapathy, John

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

13 In the dark all cats are grey: corporate
responsibility and legal responsibility
John Sabapathy




Introduction
In many ways the recent rise of corporate responsibility is in tension with the
driving impulse behind the legal structure of public limited companies (plcs).
If such companies have a genetic (legal) code, it is not to maximise share-
holder returns, contrary to popular `anti-globalisation' convention. More accu-
rately, limited liability companies have evolved from the days of the East India
Company as ways of doing precisely that ­ limiting the risk that owners took
on when investing in the company (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2003;
Bakan, 2004; Robins, forthcoming 2006). But irrespective of the explicit inter-
est of the law in framing corporate responsibility, the two are always and
necessarily intertwined, even if the law only provides the frame within which
corporate responsibility happens.
The ambiguity of the relationship is in part precisely related to the massive
recent rise in voluntary activity that has sought to achieve civil rather than
legal regulation. The phenomenon has been variously labelled as `corporate
responsibility', `corporate accountability', `corporate social responsibility'
(CSR), `corporate citizenship' or `corporate sustainability'. This proliferation
in jargon can be happily distilled to a core issue: companies' consideration
and integration of social, economic and environmental impacts into their
strategising, processes products and services. It is this that `corporate respon-
sibility' denotes in this chapter. Today thousands of non-financial reports are
produced annually (see www.globalreporting.org) addressing companies'
legal compliance with health, safety and environmental ...