City Research Online

Abstract

Corporate responsibility or say CSR, which has become a heated topic across the world over recent decades, concerns a wide range of interests than shareholders by focusing on company’s voluntary approaches to engage with social/environmental issues. In contrast, corporate accountability is more about confrontational or enforceable framework of influencing corporate behaviour through clear means for sanctioning failure. On the ground that voluntary CSR is inadequate to deliver the necessary change and secure more socially responsible activities, this article proffers a framework of corporate accountability based on existing institutional systems. Different from the neoclassical version of corporate accountability, this article insists stakeholders other than shareholders should also be able to sanction corporate results. The article thereby examines the potential of the mobilisation of the existing legal mechanisms through reward & punishment, along with the market discipline, to assist primary stakeholder groups to enforce social standards. By shifting the focus from seeking the introduction of rights and duties for companies to their effective implementation, this article wishes to serve as a start point of corporate accountability debate for scholars interested in corporate responsibility CSR topics in the future.

Publication Type:	Article
Publisher Keywords:	Corporate accountability, corporate responsibility, CSR, enforcement, stakeholder, shareholder
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Departments:	The City Law School > Academic Programmes

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