Trends in the Social [Ir]responsibility of American Multinational Corporations: Increased Power, Diminished Accountability

The purpose of this invited essay is to assess the future of the CSR performance of American multinationals in light of several ongoing trends. These trends include companies’ voluntary CSR programs and the global self-regulatory standards for responsible company activities that are developing in almost every industry. Moreover, the decade-long project at the United Nations to identify multinational companies’ responsibilities with respect to international human rights, ultimately spearheaded by Special Representative John Ruggie, has for the first time established global expectations of responsible corporate activity. At the same time, however, legal developments in the United States may be trending in the opposite direction, toward increased power and diminished accountability for corporations. Two legal developments that highlight this counter-trend will frame this discussion. The first, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) recognizes a constitutional right for corporations to give financial support to a wide range of electioneering activities, including by using corporate funds to pay for and broadcast advertisements for specific candidates for office. The effect is to allow American companies to further consolidate their already substantial political power. The second, the opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, 621 F.3d 111 (2d Cir. 2010), reh’g en banc denied, 642 F.3d 379 (2011), aff’d, 569 U.S. __ , 133 S. Ct.1659(Apr. 17, 2013), denied the possibility of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute for Royal Dutch Shell’s employees’ alleged violations of Nigerian community members’ international human rights. A 2-1 majority held instead that violations of international law could only be asserted against natural persons or nations. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and in a decision handed down on April 17, 2013, the Court unanimously affirmed the judgment of the Second Circuit. The five-Justice opinion of the Court held that the ATS cannot be used to redress violations of the law of nations that occur outside the territory of the United States, except in exceptional circumstances not found in Kiobel. Neither the majority opinion nor the concurrence addressed the corporate liability issue, which means that the Second Circuit’s ruling on that issue remains the law of the Second Circuit — an important outcome, given the significance of the Second Circuit as a venue for ATS cases. Taken together, the overall effect of the Second Circuit’s rejection of corporate liability for human rights violations and the Supreme Court’s rejection of exterritorial application of the ATS to any defendant, corporate or otherwise, is the substantial evisceration of companies’ legal accountability for international human rights violations under the ATS. On a theoretical level, these decisions send mixed messages about corporate personhood and identity. But on a practical level, the two decisions work in unfortunate concert to increase the already considerable political power of U.S. corporations at home, even as they reduce the risk of legal accountability for their actions abroad. By doing so, they shrink the shadow of the law — the threat of hard legal regulation — that has been an important incentive to the adoption of voluntary, soft-law CSR standards. Thus, these legal developments, though ostensibly unrelated to the voluntary pursuit of CSR activity, may in fact act as a disincentive to that activity

Determination of Littlest Higgs model parameters at the ILC

We examine the effects of the extended gauge sector of the Littlest Higgs model in high energy e+e- collisions. We find that the search reach in e+e- -> f fbar at a 500 GeV center-of-mass energy International Linear Collider covers essentially the entire parameter region where the Littlest Higgs model is relevant to the gauge hierarchy problem. In addition, we show that this channel provides an accurate determination of the fundamental model parameters, to the precision of a few percent, provided that the LHC measures the mass of the heavy neutral gauge field. Additionally, we show that the couplings of the extra gauge bosons to the light Higgs can be observed from the process e+e- -> Z higgs for a significant region of the parameter space. This allows for confirmation of the structure of the cancelation of the Higgs mass quadratic divergence and would verify the little Higgs mechanism.Comment: 21 pages, 15 Postscript figure

The Social Reform of Banking

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, portend further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the kinds of risks to which their loans and investments give rise -- determinations that can be, and in some cases have been, manipulated. Rather than evaluating specific regulatory interventions, this Article focuses on the culture within financial institutions themselves, particularly the global entities that are explicitly or implicitly too-big-to-fail, and on approaches to regulation that might affect and be affected by that culture. Our analysis is informed by the perspectives of anthropology, organizational and social psychology, and new governance regulatory theory. Weaving these strands of prior research together, the Article concludes with suggestions for reform, emphasizing structural reforms, accounting reforms (informed by ideas derived from both organizational psychology and transnational private regulation), and other regulatory approaches that might encourage cultural reforms within banking

The Corporate Social Responsibility Movement as an Ethnographic Problem

Over the past decade, the business world has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the concept of corporate social responsibility. CSR derives from the idea that the responsibility of a corporation extends beyond the traditional Anglo-American objective of providing maximal financial returns to its shareholders. Instead, CSR proponents have argued, the legitimate concerns of a corporation should include such broader objectives as sustainable growth, equitable employment practices, and long-term social and environmental well-being. CSR is now the focus of a well-defined and energetic movement that has manifested itself in a variety of ways. It is, in the anthropologist Sally Engle Merry\u27s phrasing, a global reform movement that represents a corner of globalization itself. The sociologist Ronen Shamir has characterized CSR as a field of action shaped by the interplay between popular pressure on corporations and the latter\u27s response to that pressure. The field is the site of a contest between those players who associate the term responsibility with an ever-increasing set of moral duties and corporations and a host of other players who tend to associate the concept of CSR with a voluntary and altruistic spirit and insist, at best, on self-regulatory schemes . In this paper we report on an ongoing project in which we endeavor to treat the CSR movement as a deterritorialized ethnographic site. We are investigating the meaning of CSR to people in corporations and their various stakeholders, examining the ways in which CSR is practiced, and assessing the potential impact, within a company and beyond, of a firm\u27s undertaking CSR initiatives. It is difficult to observe people doing CSR in a physical sense, there is no ready equivalent to a kula voyage. Nonetheless, through participant observation of public CSR events, interviews with many kinds of CSR protagonists, and discourse analysis of CSR texts, we are developing a picture of the complex culture of CSR

The Social Reform of Banking

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, portend further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the kinds of risks to which their loans and investments give rise -- determinations that can be, and in some cases have been, manipulated. Rather than evaluating specific regulatory interventions, this Article focuses on the culture within financial institutions themselves, particularly the global entities that are explicitly or implicitly too-big-to-fail, and on approaches to regulation that might affect and be affected by that culture. Our analysis is informed by the perspectives of anthropology, organizational and social psychology, and new governance regulatory theory. Weaving these strands of prior research together, the Article concludes with suggestions for reform, emphasizing structural reforms, accounting reforms (informed by ideas derived from both organizational psychology and transnational private regulation), and other regulatory approaches that might encourage cultural reforms within banking