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Copyright of Foro Internacional is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite agreement on many points, including our shared insistence that 'corporation' and 'firm' are different concepts, Jean-Philippe Robé still maintains that they are mutually exclusive: no corporation is a firm, and no firm is a corporation. In contrast, we follow standard nomenclature when we point out that all (business) corporations are firms, but some firms are not corporations. We show here that this is a standard practice among lawyers writing in leading law journals and note that Robé seems to have abandoned the task of defining the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the grounds that it does not take the distinction seriously enough. He argues that firms are not legally recognized as such, as the law only knows corporations. This argument, which is capable of different interpretations, leads to the bizarre result that corporations are not firms. Using etymological and other evidence, we show that firms are treated as legally constituted business entities in both common parlance and legal discourse. The way the law defines firms and corporations, while the product of a discourse which is in many ways distinct from everyday language, has such profound implications for the way firms operate in practice that no institutional theory of the firm worthy of the name can afford to ignore it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica (0103-3506) is the property of Revista Juridica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes's work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. This theory is widely judged to be anachronistic for contemporary business corporations, because these can now be freely formed, on the basis of private initiative. However, a close reading of the crucial passages in Hobbes's work reveals a more subtle view, which rejects this private/public dualism. Hobbes's reflections on the companies of merchants of his day provide room for business corporations' pursuit of private purposes, while keeping them embedded in a public framework of authority. Moreover, by criticizing the monopoly status of these companies, he opens up a way to integrate market failure arguments from modern economics into concession theory. The "neo-Hobbesian concession theory" emerging from this analysis shows how concession theory can accommodate private initiative and economic analysis, and thus be a relevant position in the debate about the modern business corporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to review the academic literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR), published in the peer-reviewed international research journals in the context of Pakistan. It also examines various national policies and regulatory initiatives, of the government of Pakistan, aimed at promoting CSR. The article relies heavily on CSR-specific international literature to draw implications for the case of Pakistan. Besides, it explores the trends reported in Pakistan-centred CSR literature available. We found that there is a dearth of literature looking into the status of CSR in Pakistan and the regulatory regime too is not strong enough to make corporations adopt CSR in the country. Recommendations for the government and research community have been outlined; hence, the article contributes towards setting and highlighting the future research and policy agenda for CSR in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive—a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative analysis of the reorganization of joint stock companies in the Russian Federation and business corporations in the USA (state of Delaware) through consolidation and merger: it describes legal regime of the reorganization and outlines stages related to the reorganizational procedures under the Russian and USA law.

Ecological restoration often depends on substantial funding to be initiated and sustained. So far, the dominant strategies to fund it have been philanthropic altruism or regulatory compulsion. Both make important contributions, but the commercial sector is a further source that has thus far not played a significant role relative to its potential. Just as philanthropic and regulatory strategies are both modulated by the law, so too law shapes the commercial sector's participation in ecological restoration. Corporate law and its market context are particularly significant, and they are both a potential hindrance and opportunity. Some options for law reform are available to improve the contribution of the business sector to restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how a new legally binding instrument on human rights can play a role in making business corporations, and the private sector in general, fit to contribute to the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations. The current overreliance on private sector investment as key instrument for development without adequate safeguards and accountability mechanisms is misplaced and generates distrust . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this article, based on the right to freedom of initiative, is discussed the constitutionality of judicial measure that determines the intervention in business corporations in conflict through provisional custodians. For this, it was chosen the hypothetical-deductive method of approach, starting with the categorization of free enterprise as a fundamental right. Subsequently, the panorama of the said judicial measures is presented. More than seek and provide a simple answer, are drawn constitutionality metric modeled on arguments based on the theory of fundamental rights and corporate law. As a main result, it was seen that, even if judicial intervention happen to the appointment of third parties for commercial administrator role, it preserves the essential nucleus of free enterprise and the social and extra-social corporate interests that surround the business organization, performing, abstractly, as a legitimate and constitutional measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) embodies a complete code of managing businesses in a sustainable and ethical manner. It is also considered to be one of the first initiatives to promote sustainable development. Corporate social responsibility and sustainable education and research have been instrumental in proliferating relevant knowledge and values in a society. In this article, we explored the current state of research pertaining to corporate social responsibility and sustainability undertaken in Chinese universities. We focused on peer reviewed research articles published by the faculty associated with universities in China. A literature review of 430 articles published in leading journals between 2000 and 2014 revealed 25 research studies dealing particularly with CSR in China. We aimed at finding, using meta-analysis techniques, the frequency, methodologies, industry focus, main findings and the overall impact on corporate social responsibility scholarship of the research published. We found that there was a notable increase in the corporate social responsibility articles written by Chinese university researchers during the past five years. Most of the articles employed an empirical research methodology to study corporate social responsibility in various sectors. There were no comparative studies found between China and other countries that may perform better in corporate social responsibility; such studies could provide insights for China's corporate social responsibility development. We concluded that researchers affiliated with the national key universities in China contributed a large number of articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early republic period of America, some political elites emphasized that the business corporations which was managed by social elites could improve public good. They accumulated private property for the public utilities and defined the business corporations as public institutions. In their eyes, private property not only meant independence, but also had the attributes of politics. However, in the opponents' opinion, private property was the resource of the pursuit of private profit. They refused to endow upon private property political attributes. In the conflict of the views about private property, the change of the view about private property had some impact on the transformation of the definition of business corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From ratification of the Constitution until the U.S. Civil War, private enterprise radically improved the nation's transportation infrastructure, specifically through the incorporation and subsequent physical creation of toll bridges and roads, canals, railroads, and transportation companies. Private transportation investment exceeded that of the state and national governments combined, primarily because private ventures, especially for-profit, joint stock corporations, provided transportation goods more efficiently than early governments could. Although the antebellum transportation system was imperfect, it greatly reduced travel times and freight costs and thus helped to make commodity and financial markets more efficient and the nation more politically unified than it otherwise would have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pravnik is the property of Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of State & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Business corporations in the nineteenth century often imposed limits on the voting rights of large shareholders. Economic historians have generally interpreted these voting restrictions as a contractual mechanism designed to protect small shareholders in a legal environment that afforded insufficient investor protection. This dominant account, however, fails to explain the variation in the incidence of voting restrictions across different industries and firm ownership structures, as well as their eventual disappearance from corporate charters over time. In this Article, we advance an alternative interpretation for these early voting schemes as efforts at consumer protection employed primarily by firms that were local service monopolies and collectively owned by their principal customers, none of whom wished the firm to come under the exclusive control of their competitors or of profit-maximising investors. We explore and test this proposition by analysing data on shareholder voting rights in the nineteenth century in Brazil, England, and France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate power reaches beyond land frontiers and holds sway over the lives of billions of individuals throughout communities and living environments all over the world. Regrettably, this power is not always exercised in a responsible manner when we look at the amount of violations of human rights in which corporations have been involved through their international business affairs. In order to prevent an abuse of corporate authority to the detriment of human rights, the impact of corporate power should be balanced with a matching responsibility towards all members of society. This article examines how corporate power and the protection of human rights are currently out of equilibrium. Subsequently, it explores solutions in the field of corporate law and best practices such as the emergence of social entrepreneurship to restore this equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable research attention has focused on the nature and qualities of human cognitive assets relevant to corporate organizations, the fundamental self-governing nature of business corporations, the attributes and values of management's and workers' cognitive assets, and the societal order's impacts on the architectural and governance structure of business corporations. The theory that I shall seek to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on the fundamental nature of business corporations as systems of associational cognitions, the evolutionary change of the societal rules, forms of mutually reinforcing combinations of political and corporate governance, and major determinants of corporate governance and ownership structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a preliminary analysis of the fundamental rules of the partnerships established between the non profit organizations and the peculiar world of the corporate foundations and business corporations. These partnerships are increasingly important in the current context and do not concern only transfers of money. They will become truly relevant and sustained over time and will require a "cultural jump" both for non profit entities and for business corporations. These entities have very different background and only recently they are experiencing the collaboration. The article analyzes the main assumptions and characteristics of the partnerships built between corporate foundations, businesses and non profit organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business corporation is at the centre of the modern global economy but does it act in the general interest? This paper explores Joel Bakan's film and book critique of the corporation which suggests that it is characterised by a ‘pathological pursuit of power and profit’. It seeks to extend Bakan's argument by reconsidering the ethical position of those who run corporations; the question of how far competition constrains their actions; and the extent to which the modern state can control corporations or is itself subject to similar pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]