Dr Onyeka Osuji, Reader in Law at the University of Essex, recently co-authored a paper on ‘Corporate Social Responsibility as Obligated Internalisation of Social Costs’ together with A Johnston, K Amaeshi, and E Adegbite.

The authors propose that corporations should be subject to a legal obligation to identify and internalise their social costs or negative externalities.

Their proposal reframes corporate social responsibility (CSR) as obligated internalisation of social costs and relies on reflexive governance through mandated hybrid fora.

The authors argue that their approach advances theory, as well as practice and policy, by building on and going beyond prior attempts to address social costs, such as prescriptive government regulation, Coasian bargaining and political CSR.

The paper was published open access on 1 November 2019 in the Journal of Business Ethics here.