Societal Company Sustainability, Shareholder Value, and European Company Law
Product details
Biographical note
John Quinn is Assistant Professor of Corporate Law at Dublin City University, Ireland.Many attempts have been made to reduce the harms caused by business and to make companies become socially responsible. This book approaches the subject from a new perspective arguing that reflexive law offers the best means to align the interests of large companies with those of society and that recent developments in European company law fit a reflexive model.
A reflexive company law, rather than trying to directly regulate companies, aims to affect internal decision-making processes to make companies responsive to outside interests and prevent them from operating as closed systems singularly focused on shareholder value. In this vein, the EU has recently imposed new obligations on companies to develop corporate sustainability reporting and due diligence processes as part of its objective to create a climate-neutral and sustainable economy.
This book presents an argument for how the ‘societal company’ – a company that has an internal culture of transnational responsibility to do no harm but that retains the autonomy necessary to be economically productive – can be established through reflexive law. The book will appeal to researchers, policy makers and lawyers interested in corporate sustainability, regulatory theory, company law and EU law.
Introduction
1. Models of the Company
2. A Reflexive Company Law
3. The Development of European Company Law
4. Corporate Sustainability Reporting
5. Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence
6. International Effects Of European Company Law
7. The Corporate Purpose
Conclusion
Intellectually diverse approaches to the law and its role, scope and effectiveness in the context of corporate activity.
Corporate law scholarship has a relatively recent history despite the fact that corporations have existed and been subject to legal regulation for three centuries. The modern flourishing of corporate law scholarship has been matched by some broadening of the field of study to embrace insolvency, corporate finance, corporate governance and regulation of the financial markets. At the same time, new possibilities for studying the corporation emerge from corporate law’s intersection with other legal fields (e.g., labour, contract, competition, intellectual property, and criminal law), inter-disciplinary application of social scientific and other methodologies (e.g., economics, finance, history, politics, sociology, and philosophy), and comparative study of prevailing corporate governance structures from significant commercial jurisdictions around the world. This series seeks to foster intellectually diverse approaches to thinking about the law and its role, scope and effectiveness in the context of corporate activity. In so doing the series aims to publish works of high intellectual content and theoretical rigour.