From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Liability: A Socio-Legal Study of Corporate Liability in Global Value Chains

This book offers a critical socio-legal study that brings together the latest scholarly advances on corporate social responsibility, and, at the same time, addresses the pressing issue of corporate liability for harmful acts across the supply and production chains.

Corporations have seldom been held responsible and virtually never liable for the acts of their subsidiaries and subcontractors. Actors as different as workers, investors, individual consumers, and shareholder activists claim that corporations should accept greater responsibility for communities and environments affected by their activities.

The book analyses the idea that corporations should be held liable for harm across their value chains. It posits that corporate social liability is a set of legal duties and responsibilities of a corporation for harm-causing incidents, including the negative environmental, social, and economic consequences of a company's activities across its entire value chain.

This is the first systematic attempt to critically assess the premises, dynamics, current state of play and the likely future development of the concept and application of corporate social liability, and will be essential reading for academics and policy makers with an interest in corporate law and the regulation of global supply chains.