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.