ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three questions: What is globalisation? How has globalisation affected governance? What is the place of corporate citizenship in the new forms of governance? The popularity of the globalisation concept arguably reflects a widespread intuition that social relations have in contemporary times acquired an important new character. Globalisation as the rise of supraterritoriality refers to an important change in the nature of social geography. Globalisation has also loosened some important cultural and psychological underpinnings of sovereign state hood. In addition, governance under the influence of contemporary globalisation has moved from being effectively unilayered to being much more multilayered. However, corporate citizenship should not be regarded as a substitute for greater public global law and institutions. A pessimist might read self-regulated corporate citizenship as a defensive manoeuvre by business to head off the advance of a global public sector.
