Corporations are vital to contemporary economies and bring welfare to a significant part of the world population. However, they do not always operate in an equitable manner. And many of them pose a serious threat to the environment. The aim of this project is to develop a theory of the sustainable corporation. Such a corporation is efficient, equitable and environmentally friendly. This is due not only to the way it is organized but also due to the financial network and legal context in which it is embedded.

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PhD

Fabian Corver

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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Supervisor

Dr. Prof. Frank Hindriks

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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Supervisor

Dr. Prof. Boudewijn de Bruin

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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

• Collective intentionality
• Cooperation
• Institutional change
• Normative Conflict
• Philosophy
• Theory of the firm
• Transaction cost theory

• (Business) historians
• Economic and Social History
• Economics
• Organisation science
• Philosophy

• Synthesis

• External Shocks
• Spillovers

• Reconciling stakeholder interests
• Reshaping organizational forms
• Shared responsibility and sustainable cooperation

On a traditional understanding, a system is sustainable if it maintains a certain state or growth rate without depleting resources. However, this descriptive conception is slowly but surely being replaced with a normative or value-laden one (Shi et al. 2021). The 2030 agenda of the United Nations includes not only environmental and climate concerns, but also values such as equity, community, health and gender. Against this background, the project asks three questions. SP1: What is a sustainable corporation? Philosophers commonly explicate organizations in terms of the decision-making procedures they employ and the ways in which they distribute roles (French 1984, Tuomela 1995, Pettit 2017, Hindriks 2018). SP1 complements this with the idea that organizations have a normative profile, which can be evaluated in terms of the SDGs. The claim is that organizations have (or lack) norms, values and ideals that can (and ideally, should) be supported by members of the organization. For such a profile to be effective – for it to induce compliance – it must be regarded as justified. This idea will be developed for the case of corporations using theories of perceived fairness and legitimacy in combination with the literature on sustainable institutions (Bicchieri 2006, Hindriks 2019, Hindriks 2022). SP2: How can finance contribute to the sustainable corporation? The idea that shareholders and other providers of capital may have a positive effect on corporate behavior has become widely accepted. This is reflected in such initiatives as the European Commission’s (2018) Action Plan Sustainable Finance, which is a regulatory attempt to steer private funding to climate mitigation and adaptation (de Bruin 2022b). In spite of existing work on sustainable finance (Contreras 2019), a financial ethics that captures its full potential is still lacking (but see de Bruin 2015). Thus, SP2 asks how banks, supervisors and regulators can shape a financial environment that is conducive to an integrated approach to sustainability. SP3: How can business law contribute to the sustainable organization? To investigate how legal means can be used to promote a balanced and integrated conception of sustainability, the third part of the projects zooms in on two recent developments. First, both the US and the Netherlands (and other European countries) are developing a new kind of legal entity that is meant to be specifically suitable for realizing sustainable goals: the Public-Benefit Corporation (Dulac 2015, Lund 2021). The second development is sustainability litigation. For instance, in Milieudefensie v Shell, the company was ordered to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. But it remains to be seen whether courts (judges) are in the best position to weigh all relevance interests and values, which means that litigation might exacerbate the divisions between the different dimensions of sustainability. This underscores the need for sustainable business law (de Bruin 2022).

This interdisciplinary project sets out to construct a theory that contributes to philosophy, law, and the social sciences, economics in particular. To this end, it combines analytical and theoretical tools from ethics and social ontology with theoretical and empirical findings from economics and business.