Corporate Governance Choices and the Actual Stakes of Stakeholder Governance

Abstract

Already long before the 2019 Business Roundtable’s call to rethink the ‘purpose’ of the corporation, corporate law has been a forum for competing interests. The current debate around ‘the promise of stakeholder governance’ marks another important moment in the century+ long effort to understand the nature of the business corporation, its place in society and the role of law. In order to grasp the scope of the nexus between the corporation and law, it is helpful to acknowledge the rising substantive pressure and expectations regarding CSR, ESG and DEI today but also the changing regulatory map of how corporate governance norms are produced locally and transnationally, by public and private actors. What emerges is not a Utopia but a fresh perspective and a number of new prospects on a more sustainable economic system and the place of the business corporation – and its manifold stakeholders – in it.

Keywords: Corporate Purpose, Business Roundtable, Stakeholder Governance, COVID, ESG, CSR, supply chain governance, modern slavery legislation, labor rights, platform economy, transnational corporate governance, comparative corporate governance, Bebchuk, Kovvali