Corporate social responsibility: Lessons from the South on law and business norms

• Pages: 131-157
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0193-5895(2009)0000024010
• Date: 19 May 2009
• Published date: 19 May 2009
• Author: Claire Moore Dickerson

CORPORATE SOCIAL

RESPONSIBILITY: LESSONS

FROM THE SOUTH ON

LAW AND BUSINESS NORMS

Claire Moore Dickerson

ABSTRACT

Corporate social responsibility describes the role that society expects of

business organizations. Because it is difficult to see societal norms in one’s

own society, comparative law can help us increase the salience of those

norms in our own community. Looking at how a set of business laws

uniform across 16 West and Central African countries lives in one of the

member states, Cameroon, we see that society expresses its norms not

only when behavior tracks the positive law, but also, and very importantly,

when it diverges from that law. After studying examples of divergence in

the South, specifically in the African country Cameroon, the chapter turns

to the North. Using the United States as the illustration, and focusing on

the role of business entities, the chapter identifies ways of opening the

discussion among all political constituents, even those outside the

traditional business community.

Law & Economics: Toward Social Justice

Research in Law and Economics: A Journal of Policy, Volume 24, 131–157

Copyright r2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0193-5895/doi:10.1108/S0193-5895(2009)0000024010

131

1. INTRODUCTION

Among legal professionals, a discussion of the corporation’s role in society

focuses on applicable laws. That is not surprising: we tend to value our own

stock-in-trade. Law professors question the appropriateness of corporate

governance statutes by considering what managerial behavior they

encourage, and activists bring suits to attack specific provisions they

consider nonproductive. These efforts come both from the left and the right,

and they confirm the importance of national laws.

That, at least, is how things look from the North. In Cameroon, where I

spent three months in the course of two years, I explored the limits of

national laws’ usefulness in influencing business organizations. Business in

the South can take shape relatively untrammeled by business laws, but

research in Cameroon confirms that business does get done. This research

reveals three fundamental concepts. First, corporate social responsibility is

deeply political. That is, society’s determination of the role that corpora-

tions are to play within that community is political. Typically, the desired

role falls somewhere along a spectrum that at one end allocates all interests

to owners, a model often called ‘‘shareholder primacy,’’ and at the other end

allocates those interests across a wider range of stakeholders, including

some combination of employers, suppliers, customers, and sometimes even

some portion of the local community.

Second, corporate governance standards embedded in the business laws

have a limited ability to channel corporate behavior, especially in the face of

divergent cultural norms. These points of divergence appear when there is

persistent disobedience of legal norms or when players are systemati-

cally behaving ‘‘better’’ than the legal standard requires. The third basic

concept is that these behaviors help reveal the cultural norms that under-

gird the relevant community’s true understanding of corporate social

responsibility.

A comparative study finds parallels in the North, specifically in the

United States: corporate social responsibility is a political phenomenon;

corporate governance laws implement the corporate social responsibility

norm and simultaneously both influence and are defined by that overarching

norm. Because the split between national laws and applicable culture is not

as marked in the North as in the South, corporate governance laws in the

United States do tend to implement, and thus to reflect, the applicable

corporate social responsibility norm. Where, instead, corporate governance

laws diverge from behavior, corporate social responsibility is again

highlighted by the dissonance.

CLAIRE MOORE DICKERSON132