Corporate Law Reform for Sustainable Business

We face a convergence of crises, and a grand challenge of how to achieve social progress for all without destroying the very basis of our existence. Business has a crucial role. The dominant business form is the corporation. This paper presents the results of a multi-jurisdictional comparative analy...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational OFEL Conference on Governance, Management and Entrepreneurship p. 51
Main Author Sjåfjell, Beate
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Zagreb Centar za istrazivanje i razvoj upravljanja d.o.o 01.04.2017
Subjects
Boards of directors
Business forms
Climate change
Collaboration
Comparative analysis
Corporate governance
Environmental law
Externality
Investigations
Legal reform
Regulation
Social norms
Social progress
Social responsibility
Society
Stockholders
Sustainability
Sustainable development
United States > US
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Summary:We face a convergence of crises, and a grand challenge of how to achieve social progress for all without destroying the very basis of our existence. Business has a crucial role. The dominant business form is the corporation. This paper presents the results of a multi-jurisdictional comparative analysis of corporate law seeking to investigate the barriers and possibilities for sustainable business in this dominant form. The social norm of the shareholder primacy drive is identified as the main barrier. Shareholder primacy has cannibalised the space that corporate law leaves open for the discretion of the individual corporate board. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting is generally neither relevant nor reliable and therefore insufficient for the fundamental change needed. The paper presents a corporate reform proposal that has the potential to be the key to mitigating shareholder primacy based on these finding, and concluding with introducing the on-going work on how to shift business (and other market actors) away from business as usual and onto a sustainable path.