The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches, which are controversial, complex and unclear.

This paper attempts to explain how the separation of security ownership and control, typical of large corporations, can be an efficient form of economic organization. We first set aside the presumption that a corporation has owners in any meaningful sense

This article considers two prominent, competing approaches to defining the scope of business responsibility for human rights. The first approach advocates extension of business responsibility beyond the boundaries of the enterprise to encompass broader ‘spheres of influence’. The second approach advocates a business ‘responsibility to respect’ human rights (but not a ‘positive’ duty to protect, promote or fulfil rights).

There is a growing body of literature on ethical or socially responsible investment across a range of disciplines. This paper highlights the key themes in the field and identifies some of the major theoretical and practical challenges facing both scholars and practitioners. One of these challenges is understanding better the complexity of the relationship between such investment practices and corporate behaviour. Noting that ethical investment is seldom characterised by agreement about what it actully constitutes, and that much of the extant research focuses on a narrow set of issues, the paper argues that there are benefits associated with examining ethical investment as a process.

Of the world's multiple national variations on a basically capitalist system, the paper compares the century's history of the British and American, the two 'pioneers' whose institutions and economic behaviour patterns most closely confirm to, and those of Germany and Japan whose institutions most significantly deviate from, the prescriptions of neo-classical textbooks.

In this article, we examine the state of the art in comparative and international corporate governance by identifying the key research questions, main concepts, and paradigms of explanations of cross‐country diversity in corporate governance

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) over recent years and highlights the prospects for an increasingly strong connection with the practice of corporate social responsibility. The paper argues that not only has SRI grown significantly, it has also matured. In particular, it has become an investment philosophy adopted by a growing proportion of large investment institutions. This shift in SRI from margin to mainstream and the position in which institutional investors find themselves is leading to a new form of SRI shareholder pressure. Although this bears some resemblance to lobbying campaigns which might take advantage of shareholder rights, we seek to distinguish it as an important phenomenon in its own right one to which corporate executives are likely to be paying increasing attention in the years to come. We further argue that this approach potentially meets some of the earlier ethical criticisms of certain forms of SRI but, ironically, probably owes its existence to those pioneering approaches. We conclude with some suggestions for further research to inform discussion of the issues highlighted in the paper.