Hard soft law or soft hard law? A content analysis of CSR guidelines typologized along legal status.
Additional information
Authors
Cominetti M.,
Seele P.
Type
Journal Article
Year
2016
Language
English
Abstract
A CSR guideline is an instrument aimed at guiding
companies towards the application of CSR to limit the
impact that the company has on society. The main problem
concerned with CSR guidelines is that their legal status is
blurred and as a consequence, their level of enforceability is
not clearly understandable. Therefore, this paper focuses on
defining the legal status of CSR guidelines through a content
analysis of a sample of 34 CSR guidelines.
Through the criteria-based development of a codebook, it
has been possible to define the legal status of the guidelines
and define the difference as hybrid forms leading to: soft
soft, hard soft, soft hard and hard hard legal status. Every
guideline was coded as belonging to one of the four hybrid
legal status’. In fact, it is required to consider all the
voluntary and all the mandatory guidelines as equivalent,
as there is the necessity to further specify their legal status
and their characteristics. The results obtained allowed
not only to answer the research questions but also to arrive
at further insights: even today, CSR should be considered
a voluntary initiative, the government is playing an indirect
role through voluntary CSR guidelines and increasing
mandataory CSR regulations like in the EU (CSR reporting)
or India (company act). Lastly, CSR guidelines need
to be seen as interconnected in the co-evolution of CSR
application.
Journal
uwf UmweltWirtschaftsForum
Volume
24
Number
2
Start page number
127
End page number
140
