ABSTRACT
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a catalogue of high-profile disasters and controversies has drawn attention to the problematic nature of the relationship between large corporations and society. The list would include: the Shell Brent, Spar incident.2 the Shell crisis in Nigeria,3 the Bhopal chemical spill,4 the Exxon Valdez oil spill,5 the use of slave labour in Burma and the controversial
1 H R Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (University of Iowa Press, Iowa 2013 (originally published 1953)) 5
2 In 1995 Greenpeace controversially stopped the dumping of the Brent Spar (North Sea) oil storage facility in the ocean. See G Jordan, Shell, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar (Palgrave, Basingstoke 2001)
3 Shell’s alleged complicity in the deaths of Ogoni human rights activists in 1995 and other human rights violations. See D Wheeler, H Fabig and R Boele, ‘Paradoxes and Dilemmas for Stakeholder Responsive Firms in the Extractive Sector: Lessons from the case of Shell and the Ogoni’ (2002) 39(3) Journal of Business Ethics 297-318 and B Manby, Shell in Nigeria: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Ogoni Crisis (Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, Case 267 published by Institute for the Study of diplomacy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 2000)
4 In 1984, there was a chemical leak from a storage facility in Bhopal, India that resulted in the death of thousands of people. See R A G Monks and N Minow, Corporate Governance (3rd ed., Blackwell, Oxford 2004) 18-19. See also J Woodroffe, ‘Regulating Multinational Corporations in a World of Nation States’ in M K Addo (ed.), Human Rights Standards and the Responsibility of Transnationals (Kluwer International, The Hague 1999) 131-140
5 In 1989 there was an oil tanker accident resulting in one of the largest oil spills ever. This
working conditions in Asian factories, the baby milk scandals, the conflicts between indigenous peoples, mining communities and mining companies in South American countries, Papua New Guinea and other areas,8 the pharmaceutical industry and the anti-retroviral drugs crisis,9 the Enron collapse,10 the banking crisis of 2008,11 the BP-Gulf of Mexico oil spill12, the Rana-Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh13 and the VW emissions scandal14 to mention but a few. These incidents and crises have thrown open questions about the impact of corporations, especially multinational corporations, on various aspects and actors within society. Freeland observes that:
fish. The livelihood of the local fishing population was also adversely affected. J A Wiens, Oil in the Environment: Legacies and Lessons of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Cambridge University Press, New York 2013)
6 A Ramasastry, ‘Corporate Complicity: From Nuremburg to Rangoon, an Examination of Forced Labour Cases and Their Impact on the Liability of MNC’ (2002) 20 Berkeley Journal of International Law 91-137
7 Most of the controversies and scandals have taken place in developing countries, see the 1970s Nestlé SA scandals and the 2008 China baby milk scandal-C Boyd, ‘The Nestlé Infant Formula Controversy and a Strange Web of Business Scandals’ (2012) 106 (3) Journal of Business Ethics 283-293; ‘China’s Baby-milk Scandal: Formula for Disaster’ The Economist 20 September 2008, 57
8 N Yakovleva, CSR in the Mining Industries (Ashgate, Aldershot 2005); T E Downing, J Moles, I McIntosh and C Garcia-Downing, Indigenous Peoples and Mining Encounters: Strategies and Tactics April 2002 Report No. 57 Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD), Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), 2002 https://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G00548.pdf
9 World Bank Development Report 2006, Equity and Development (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development)), World Bank and Oxford University Press, Washington, DC 2005) 215, E Cloatre, Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013)
10 The sudden collapse of a large energy corporation, Enron, opened up questions on the ethical aspect of such corporations. Buhr and Grafstrom remark that ‘the collapse of ENRON in the autumn of 2001 marked a watershed in the discussion of CSR’. See H Buhr and M Grafstrom, ‘The Making of Meaning in the Media, the Case of CSR in the FT’ in F Den Hond, F G A De Bakker and P Neergaard, Managing CSR in Action: Talking, Doing and Measuring (Ashgate, Aldershot 2007) 15-32, 26
11 R A Posner A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2009)
12 C Freeland, ‘What’s BP’s Social Responsibility?’ 19 July 2010 Reuters online <https://blogs. reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2010/07/19/whats-bps-social-responsibility> accessed 3 February 2016
13 This tragedy involving garment factory workers resulted in the death of 1,100 people. For an analysis of the implications in English private law, see A Ruhmkorf, Corporate Social Responsibility, Private Law and Global Supply Chains (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2015) 213-233
14 The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal which was revealed in September 2015. VW admitted installing sophisticated software to cheat emissions tests in at least 11 million vehicles. <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/10/volkswagen-emissionsscandal-timeline-events>; accessed 3 February 2015. See also C M Elson, C K Ferrere and N J Goossen, ‘The Bug At Volkswagen: Lessons in Co-Determination, Ownership, and Board
the Gulf oil spill and the financial crisis have taught us, rather brutally, that the heart of the relationship between business and society doesn’t lie with the charitable deeds companies do in their off-hours but whether they are doing in their day jobs in ways that help – or hurt – the rest of us.15
