회사본질과 기업의 사회적 책임

Ironically the higher becomes the rate of growth of global economy, the bigger possibilities of global environmental disaster become. Futhermore neoliberalism on which global economy has been based for recent two decades has aggravated human life conditions through a global aggravation of the income bipolarization. Therefore Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) is a practical device to correct the global paradoxes. CSR refers to companies voluntarily going beyond what the law requires to achieve social and environmental objectives during the course of their daily business activities. The recent debate on the mandatory adoption of compliance system to listed companies in Korea shows the need for research on CSR from the legislation theory perspective. The core of this debate is whether 'voluntary initiative' or 'legally binding regulation' is desirable in realizing CSR, and this is the typical subject of legislation theory. And the major legal debate on CSR is whether corporate managers should consider not only shareholders in making their decisions but also other stakeholders affected by those decisions. The dominant thesis for the nature of the corporate in the United States has been shareholder primacy theory, with this view, corporate managers should make business decisions only for the maximization of the shareholders who invest their money for the purpose of making profits. On the other side of the debate, the norm of corporate social responsibility is a major debate about the nature of the corporation. It would be noticeable that stakeholder theory has become increasingly popular in the United States. The European Commission encourages companies to apply fair employment practices that respect human rights, particularly where products come from outside the EU. The Commission presents a European strategy to promote CSR. CSR involves companies integrating social and environmental objectives in their business operations and in their interaction with the actors concerned. I argue that the relationship between narrow business interests and CSR practices is influenced by institutional constraints: state capacity, social collaboration, roles of stakeholders, the engagement of nongovernmental and independent organization, and local community.