ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses and analyses an increasingly popular tool that companies use to meet the goal of corporate sustainability. Codes of conduct (CoC), codes of ethics and codes of practice have become extremely popular over recent years and have been widely adopted across industries, countries and sectors (Leipziger 2003; Sethi 2003; Wood et al. 2004). While initially codes have tended to focus on corporate governance issues (Aguilera and Cuervo-Cazurra 2004), this has increasingly shifted towards broader societal issues. In particular multinational corporations (MNCs) have adopted CoCs in the context of growing public concern about working conditions in their overseas operations and the responsible use of their economic power more generally (e.g. Emmelhainz and Adams 1999; Kolk et al. 1999; Gordon and Miyake 2001; Pearson and Seyfang 2001; Kolk and van Tulder 2004; Kolk 2005).
