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This chapter charts the historical rise of the business corporation as an increasingly dominant social institution. Its main focus is on the growing power of business in the late 20th century, the roots of this power, and the ways in which it has been exercised.

This chapter suggests a novel way of considering the human rights responsibilities of transnational corporations (TNCs). The kind of globalization recommended here proposes an enriched understanding of the obligation of TNCs to respect human rights. In addition, it argues that simply emphasizing certain views of the current situation will bring the understanding closer to this objective: transforming TNCs into instruments for a more humane kind of globalization, one which not only respects the full set of internationally recognized human rights, but which also ensures that they will be further realized, in combination with economic growth. It specifically explores what may be labelled the failings of the micro-analysis approach to include the responsibilities of TNCs towards human rights-driven development. Moreover, some mechanisms which could be applied to move in the direction proposed are determined. Emphasis is placed on the responsibilities of developed states and multilateral lending institutions.

This chapter deals with the definitions and descriptions — many of which are neither self-evident nor universally understood — that articulate the defining characteristics of FDI and MNCs. First, the structure, governance, and objectives of the basic corporation — the first stage and underlying persona of an MNC — are spelled out. The next section reviews different terms used to refer to what in this book are dubbed MNCs and explains how these terms emanate from different perceptions of the behavior and management of multinational businesses. The final section specifically defines what constitutes an MNC and what constitutes FDI.

This chapter considers the institutions, with a focus on the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the World Trade Organisation, to sketch some contours of reform and change necessary in the existing system. It then sets out the issues, of emerging significance in the contemporary world, to suggest that there are some missing institutions, which are needed. The issues selected, global macroeconomic management, international financial architecture, transnational corporations, cross-border movements of people, or international public goods and public bads, are illustrative rather than exhaustive. In addition, the chapter explores some important elements of governance, such as structures of representation or decision-making in institutions, international rules or norms, evolution or change in institutions, and the role of the nation state, which are critical for any vision about the future.

This chapter argues that stock exchanges organized in the post-colonial era were created to indigenize a degree of foreign direct investment. Transnational corporations listing shares on exchanges in the developing world sought a quotation for the benefit of local employees and recognition as a truly transnational firm. Generally these listings were expensive and illiquid, and managerial control remained foreign. However, states found them attractive in an era of “anti”-foreign investment since they dampened criticism of foreign investment, and the capital raised usually remained in the country in question.

This chapter, building on Ch. 4, analyzes the representation of local risk scenarios in two American novels that focus on exposure to chemical toxins, Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Richard Powers’s Gain. DeLillo’s novel, which reflects on a wide range of chemical risks from industrial toxins all the way to psychopharmaceuticals, uses postmodern satire to shed light on the difficulties of telling reality apart from cultural perception in the context of ecological and technological hazards. It portrays a “risk society” in Ulrich Beck’s sense in which risk has become part of the fabric of everyday life for ordinary citizens. Powers’s Gain outlines a similar scenario but explores in depth the rise of transnational corporations and global economic networks that give rise to local risks. While his narrative, more so than DeLillo’s, seeks to highlight the way in which the inhabitation of the local is shaped by global forces, it is less successful than DeLillo’s in developing a narrative technique commensurate with this ambition; Powers’s omniscient narration does not allow for the indeterminacies of risk perception that DeLillo translates into narrative form.

This chapter analyses international systems of governance for transnational corporations (TNCs) and for technology transfer in the emerging world. This world provides a very different setting for industrial growth from that of half a century ago, when much of the ‘development strategy’ was launched. Technical change is now more rapid and pervasive, affecting most activities in developing countries. It is shrinking economic distance dramatically, exposing enterprises to intense and immediate competition so far unprecedented in history. Trade plays a much larger role in economic life, and much of it is handled by large transnationals and an increasing proportion of trade and production is integrated across national boundaries under the aegis of the TNC. Technology and direct investment flows are now not subject to much direct regulation at the international level, traditional controls on these flows are one of the casualties of liberalisation and globalisation.

This chapter focuses on the attention which transnational corporations have attracted in public international law over recent decades. The starting point is the world of the Codes of Conduct in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the experience with the United Nations (UN) Global Compact in the broader context of Corporate Social Responsibility, and the work of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights, before a proposal for an International Code on Corporate Responsibility is submitted.

This chapter covers the discourses of corporate social responsibility and citizenship as relatively “deterritorialized” and “non-legal” responses to problems of corporate regulation. It explores two different formulations of responsibility in corporate regulation. The first formulation focuses on responsibility in the context of U.S.-based legal debates over the social and political effects of economic concentration, while the second formulation considers attempts to make transnational corporations behave responsibly through international legal frameworks and voluntary agreements. The chapter concludes with a description of Stephen Hymer’s lecture regarding the inability of private multinational capitalism to provide a world of peace and prosperity.

This chapter assesses the value of a corporate code of conduct as a mechanism for ensuring fair labour standards. It extends the frontiers of labour regulation to embrace what is essentially a private international mechanism, although it is candid in assessing the difficulties thereby posed. Voluntary codes are emerging as the most significant feature of a fragile, inchoate regime of transnational labour market regulation. Employers are supposed to be the object of that regulation, but they are also its primary authors and administrators; they can conjure it up or make it disappear pretty much whenever and for whatever reason they wish. But workers — supposedly the beneficiaries of this regulation — lack the power to create it, significantly to influence its terms, or even to insist that they receive its promised benefits. They can only denounce it and try to rob it of its legitimacy.

This chapter identifies common traits as well as basically different characteristics of international human rights and investment laws. Developments in both spheres reflect fundamental structural changes in international law since World War II, enhancing the legal protection of individuals as well as of various associations and legal persons that are active in these spheres. One of the most fundamental commonalities to both international human rights and investment law is the asymmetric legal relationship between sovereign states and individuals, including foreign investors. Consequently, legal rules and institutions developed in these spheres strive to compensate the inferior position of individuals and investors under the domestic law by enhancing legal protection at the international level. These two branches of international law have evolved differently along the private-public divide. The chapter discusses the case law of international investment tribunals that have encountered arguments regarding the applicability and relevance of international human rights law to investment disputes.

This chapter explores a particular set of practices of resistance to the onset of the trade-related, market-friendly paradigm of human rights, which takes the form of full reassertion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paradigm in relation to corporate governance and business conduct. This reassertion is articulated under the very auspices of the United Nations system, which otherwise fosters contemporaneously, and assiduously, the trade-related market-friendly paradigm of human rights. This chapter focuses on the Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights, formulated by a Working Group of five independent experts. It explores five related themes: the dense intertextuality of the Norms and the Commentary; the ‘network’ conception of corporate governance and business conduct; ways of categorizing the range of general and specific obligations; strategies of implementation; and business ethics in relation to human rights.

Corporations have limited responsibilities in international law but enjoy far-reaching rights and privileges. International legal debates often conceive of this issue as a problem of business accountability for human rights violations. Conceptually, the issue of corporations in international law has focused on whether or not they are, or ought to be, recognized as ‘subjects’ of responsibility in international law and on the adequate conceptual analogy to the corporation. The introduction presents an alternative way of thinking about the role of international law and its relevance to the private business corporation. It traces the emergence of the contemporary legal architecture for corporations in international law and shows how modern international law constitutes a framework within which businesses and governments allocate resources and responsibilities—a framework that began to operate as early as the late-nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth century.

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.

This chapter focuses on the Service Employees International Union's (SEIU) comprehensive campaign strategy to engage transnational corporations, i.e. negotiating with European CEOs, rather than organizing European workers. This strategy involves heavy lifting for union staff, a large budget, and dedicated researchers in the hopes that it will provide more fertile ground for worker organizing. The chapter also explores this method as it was employed against Group 4 Securicor (G4S), particularly the ways in which an alliance of unions was able to undermine the company's aggressive antiunionism. It discusses how SEIU organized security guards in the United States, as well as the complex expansion of their campaign to multiple countries.

The economic and social challenges of the twenty-first century in the quest for sustainable development are multiple. On the positive side, good progress was achieved in setting clear targets and the results that eventually came with them. Human longevity, poverty reduction, overseas development assistance, and the fight against corruption all show progress. In other areas, the future is less certain. Some tools, including free trade, have reached unprecedented heights in creating economic growth. Ensuring that this is always a tool for good, by avoiding damaging subsidies, for example is necessary. An equally big challenge for free trade is ensuring that distributions of benefits are more equitable. The challenge will also be in accepting that although voluntary measures, ranging from those for ethical consumers through to those for responsible corporations, are commendable and can produce good results in some instances, there are limits to how far voluntary approaches may go.

This chapter examines the pathways that tie the neoliberal phase of global capitalism to patterns of health and illness. It explores the phases of financial liberalization and the health impact of structural adjustment programs in LMICs following the 1980s debt crisis, as well as the austerity agenda in HICs since the 2008 onset of global financial and economic crises. It discusses the: World Trade Organization and the contemporary trade and investment regime; influence of corporate interests on new bilateral and regional agreements; implications of illicit financial flows for foregone social spending on health, and impact of transnational corporations on health, work conditions, and human rights. Also analyzed are the effects of neoliberal globalization on labor markets in terms of outsourced, precarious, and hazardous employment and the ratcheting down of labor standards and occupational safety and health. The final section highlights ongoing government resistance and social struggles against neoliberal globalization.

This chapter examines the certification standards for “green” foods in Southeast Asia. It highlights the role of transnational corporations in setting and enforcing standards that are required for local firms to export organic foods from this region to international markets, and their discursive power in framing “organics” as a key marketing point for Western markets. The chapter also describes the complex relations of transnational corporations with other actors such as the state, aid agencies, and farmers’ associations in the context of the fast-growing international market for organic foods.