A Meta-regulation Approach to Laws to Incorporate CSR Principles in Corporate Self-Regulation

How, and to what extent, legal regulation matters in developing social responsibility in companies are long debated questions. In the corporate regulation landscape, while some legal regulation reformers have argued that the prescriptive mode of regulation has failed to facilitate, reward, or encourage companies to go beyond their profit-centred behaviour, others have argued that relying only on corporate self-regulation is not a viable approach to enable the incorporation of social values in corporate behaviour in the absence of non-legal social drivers. In the context of this dilemma, meta-regulation is a comparatively new regulatory approach that encourages companies to transcend their social responsibilities. Its normative base is built on the arguments of the ‘third perspective’ discussed in the previous chapter of this book. The core of this regulatory approach is the fusion of the responsive and reflexive modes of regulation to merge the patterns of private ordering and state control in contemporary corporate regulation. This chapter describes this approach to assist legal regulation to ensure social values are accepted as a central corporate responsibility from the perspective of a weak economy.