Throughout the last decades, the social responsibility of corporations has undergone significant changes. From revolving around self-regulation, voluntariness, and soft law, the regulatory landscape has expanded to involve harder demands on corporations, such as mandatory sustainability due diligence. This thesis considers these changes as a hardening of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and explores such hardening as an outcome of contestation and struggle. In doing so, it echoes critical scholars’ call for criminology to direct attention toward the harms committed by powerful entities – in this case, large corporations in the global context – and the interests that frame the regulatory response to such harms. 

Three papers are included in this thesis, focusing on key actors that participate in the contestation and struggle under study: politicians (Paper I), corporations (Paper II), and non-governmental organizations (Paper III). The first two papers consider struggles for and against regulatory hardening, and shed light on the contradictory dynamics that permeate these struggles, while the third paper explores how organizations struggling for justice in the wake of corporate harm seek to alter the contours of the existing regulatory landscape. Taken together, the papers offer insight into how social actors articulate demands for change, or resist such change, and their underscoring interests or ambitions.

This thesis situates these findings in previous research on the regulation of corporate social and environmental responsibility, considers the papers’ methodologies, and develops the theoretical lens through which the findings can be understood. The final analytical discussion considers the hardened regulations as solutions, with the problem at hand being the paradigm of self-regulation and voluntariness that has long characterized CSR. This problematization is interpreted as an articulation of internal critique, in which social actors strive for consistency between practices and normative expectations. Thus, new regulatory practices, which conform to these expectations, have been proposed. The analysis then traces this problematization, and the contestation around it, to fundamental contradictions. Drawing attention to the inherent contradictoriness of CSR as a social formation, it argues that this should be understood as the driving force behind contestation and thus the hardening trend itself. In addition, the analysis considers the transformative potential in actors’ struggles, suggesting that some may go beyond an adjustment of regulatory practices to an existing normative framework.

All in all, the thesis contributes to criminological research on corporate responsibility by highlighting the dynamics of conflict and contradiction involved in contemporary regulation. Moreover, by understanding hardening as a solution to a problem, revolving around the shortcomings of CSR – which was itself introduced as a regulatory solution in the 1990s – the thesis situates the regulation of today in a historical development. By doing so, it draws attention to both continuity and change in this regulatory landscape. 

For victims of corporate harm, accessing justice in the global landscape is fraught with challenges and limitations –but also contestation and conflict. This paper focuses on these issues by directing attention to the National ContactPoints (NCPs), a nonjudicial grievance mechanism in this landscape. It explores the puzzle of why complainants,who portray the NCP as a mechanism that is unlikely to provide accountability and redress in specific instances,still file complaints. Drawing on interviews with organizations that have turned to the Swedish NCP, as well as arange of documentary sources, the paper maps out the organizations’ reasons for doing so. These include, amongothers, an ambition to increase visibility of corporate harm and to showcase flaws in the global governancelandscape. The paper argues that organizations turn to the NCP to address injustice related to economic, cultural,and political dimensions, but also to challenge existing structures for justice and attempt to transform thesestructures from below.

Mandatory due diligence has become increasingly common to address the harmful impacts of corporations, forcing them to navigate hardened regulatory requirements. This article focuses on the responses of large Swedish companies to the European Commission’s proposal for a Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Drawing on critical theory, it aims to understand how companies navigate the contradictory dynamic between profitability and sustainability. The findings highlight that companies, for the most part, accept hardened demands for sustainability—but the closer to corporate practice their responses get, the more they oppose and reject these demands. The article discusses how these responses follow a neoliberal logic of regulation, and draw attention to the inherent instability of this logic, as companies struggle to find a position in which they can be both sustainable and profitable.

In recent years, the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has undergone a shift towards hardening, illustrated by a wave of new mandatory and state-based regulation. This article aims to understand the dynamic behind this shift, by studying struggles for regulatory hardening in the Swedish Parliament. Drawing on a critical theory of contradictions, it proposes an understanding of CSR as a contradictory social formation, which structures the parliamentary struggles. Moreover, it suggests that although the hardening trend could amount to a crisis of the traditional understanding of CSR, politicians remain embedded in a neoliberal logic of regulation. The article ends with a call for research to continue to explore alternative roads towards minimizing corporate harm in the future.

This article seeks to develop an understanding of how corporations manage their social and ethical responsibilities, whilst simultaneously facing allegations of crime. It draws on the case of TeliaSonera, a Swedish corporation prosecuted for committing bribery in Uzbekistan. The article begins by introducing the reader to this so-called Uzbek affair', before exploring how corporate governance has shifted in the new regulatory landscape, and the role CSR plays in this landscape. Secondly, it critically deconstructs TeliaSonera's regulatory regime, in order to analyse how the risks of corruption and bribery are managed in the aftermath of the Uzbek affair, and what functions this management fulfils for the corporation's front stage performance. By drawing on the distinction between primary and secondary risk management as proposed by Power [1, 2], the article argues that the regime in place to manage social and ethical risks simultaneously manages reputational and profitability-related risks, thus illustrating the dual functions of corporate risk management. This duality, it is suggested, is a consequence of the responsibilisation process in which corporations have become self-regulating entities, which allows for a risk management of everything' (cf. [1]).