The Significance of Moving Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been widely studied for a long time by, for example, management studies and political sciences (Carroll et al. 2012; Scherer and Palazzo 2011), but has for a long time only played a minor role in law and legal scholarship. One of the main reasons for this was that CSR was traditionally considered to be ‘above and beyond’ what companies are required to do by law. Characterised by a soft law approach voluntary CSR standards were typically, developed by corporations, by NGOs and by international organisations. However, recurrent reports about human rights violations in global supply chains and the actions of companies in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis have questioned the soft law approach to CSR and has put a ‘hard law’ law approach on the agenda.