Even though corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a widely accepted
concept promoted by different business stakeholders, business corporations’ internal
strategies, known as corporate self-regulation in most of the weak economies,
respond poorly to this responsibility. It seems that most of the weak economies’
laws relating to corporate regulation and responsibilities do not possess any recurrent
bearing insisting on corporate self-regulation to create a socially responsible
corporate culture. How the laws and legal regulations relating to CSR could
contribute to the inclusion of CSR principles at the core of corporate selfregulation,
without being intrusive in normal business practice, is the phenomenon
investigated in this book.
This book proposes that a ‘meta-regulation’ approach to laws relating to corporate
regulation and social responsibility would be an effective legal strategy to
incorporate CSR principles into corporate self-regulation. It conceptualizes this
legal strategy as a fusion of responsive and reflexive modes of regulation, particularly
by converging the patterns of private ordering and state control in contemporary
corporate law from the perspective of a weak economy. It describes different
meta-regulation strategies for laws to link social values to economic incentives and
disincentives and to indirectly influence companies to incorporate CSR principles at
the core of their self-regulation strategies.
Most of the weak economies’ laws relating to companies and their social
responsibilities have the scope to contain a meta-regulation approach. This book
assesses that scope taking Bangladesh as a case study. It concludes that inclusion of
this regulatory approach in weak economies’ laws would be suitable to alleviate
regulators’ limited access to information and expertise, enlist corporate commitment,
and enhance the self-regulatory capacity of companies. This is also necessary
to overcome the inherent limitations of prescriptive rules to raise CSR in weak
economies.