The Open Corporation: Effective Self-regulation and Democracy

Description

The Open Corporation sets out an innovative and realistic blueprint for effective corporate self-regulation, offering practical strategies for managers, stakeholders and regulators to build successful self-regulation management systems. Christine Parker examines the conditions under which corporate self-regulation of social and legal responsibilities is likely to be effective, covering a wide range of areas - from consumer protection to sexual harassment to environmental compliance. Focusing on the features that make self-regulation or compliance management systems effective, Parker argues that law and regulators need to focus much more on 'meta-regulating' corporate self-regulation if democratic control over corporate action is to be established. For Parker, the ideal of the open corporation should be a union between government, democracy and the law.

Christine Parker is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Just Lawyers (1999) and a contributor to The Survival Guide for Compliance Professionals (2001).

"In a lively and challenging work that is light years away from the received wisdom that the corporation is answerable only to the profit motive of its shareholders, Christine Parker seeks to explore the possibility of transforming the corporation from an object of external regulation to a subject capable of self-regulation." Griffith Law Review