Corporate behaviour

Under the generic name of socially responsible investment, there are actually a multitude of different philosophies ethics, sustainable development, materiality of extra-financial factors, etc. These various approaches differ as regards both the criteria and analytical tools used to assess corporate behaviour and performance, and the techniques used to build portfolios. 

Practice-based criteria are intended to capture the actual corporate behaviour and not just the corporate commitments. As for policy-based criteria, the practice-based ones are generally aimed at capturing human rights violations by companies. This specific type of exclusion is also sometimes called norm-based screening. 

In order to understand the importance of the issue of work-related death, it is important to gauge how many fatalities of this sort actually occur. Attempting to do so illustrates three key points the sheer volirme of harm that occurs as a result of corporate behaviour, the difficulty of measuring this harm, and the key role that statistics play in redefining... 

Developments (1979) Developments in the Law Corporate Crime Regulating Corporate Behaviour Through Criminal Sanctions, Harvard Law Review, 92/2 1227-1375. 

R. Sarre and J. Richards (2005) Responding to Culpable Corporate Behaviour Current Developments in the Industrial Manslaughter Debate, Flinders Journal of Law Reform, 8/1 93-111. 

The model of market and corporate behaviour which is often assumed to underlie state regulation of economic life is the neo-classical one derived from economics. According to this view regulation is the natural opponent of the market. So in the absence of regulation it is assumed that there would be market competition, and that the market without regulation would be unrestrained (Abolafia, 1985 313 Colebatch, 1989). Regulation may therefore be seen as intervention to restrain competition either to make the market operate more efficiently (i.e. remedy market failure) or to prevent undesirable outcomes (i.e. welfare objectives). This model assumes that organizations are coherent, hierarchical, and... 

Knowledge of legal sanctions takes on importance according to deterrence models of corporate behaviour and law. If these models are correct then companies act to avoid sanctioning. There are a number of versions of this theory. Some suggest that the actual severity of the penalty may be significant, while others focus more heavily on the symbolic consequences of legal action. 

Miller, K., and Sturdivant, F. (1977) Consumer Responses to Socially Corporate Behaviour An Empirical Test , Journal of Consumer Research 4/1. 

Stone, C. (1975) Where the Law Ends The Social Control of Corporate Behaviour, Prospect Heights Waveland Press. 

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