Responsabilité des entreprises et corégulation

Thomas BERNS, Pierre-François DOCQUIR, Benoît FRYDMAN, Ludovic HENNEBEL et Gregory LEWKOWICZ, Responsabilité des entreprises et corégulation, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2007.

Globalization increases the power of companies while reducing the ability of states to control them. This redistribution of powers implies, urgently, a redefinition of responsibilities. Does the only mission of the company consist in making profit or must it assume other duties vis-à-vis its workers, the environment, the States which welcome it or more generally humans whose existence it affects? This is the whole current debate on the « social responsibility » of companies. But what exactly is the nature of this responsibility: moral, legal, even political? Is the company responsible and guarantor of human rights? And above all, how can such responsibilities actually be implemented and by whom?

Faced with the powerlessness of conventional legal means, new control techniques are developing, which rely less on the strength of the law than on the pressure of the markets, less on the imposition of rules than on the publicity of information. Codes of conduct, fair trade labels, ethical funds, rating or certification agencies, standards of standardization, supervisory authorities, inspectors, informants, whistle-blowers, all proliferating, competing and sometimes complementary. Their arrangement ends up constituting, in the manner of a do-it-yourself, mechanisms of co-regulation, adjusted to the constraints of our time, whose logic deviates resolutely from the model of the legal order, national or international. This book describes the devices. He analyzes the issues and traces their perspectives.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 29 juin 2018 à 18 h 59 min.