Global governance and democratic legitimacy: a bottom-up approach

Emerging Paradigms of Corporate Social Responsibility, Regulation, and Governance: Introduction to the Thematic Symposium

“…Much of this work casts doubts on the legitimacy and credibility of CSR as self-and private regulation and need further research. Given only limited exchange and collaboration among academic disciplines and sub-disciplines, and the multidisciplinary nature and the use of CSR as forms of regulation and governance (Wouters et al 2013), forging cross-and multidisciplinary research collaborations can advance the conceptual and theoretical understanding of business ethics and CSR, and contribute to effective conduct, regulation, and governance of corporate and organizational behavior. Graz et al (2019) and Jackson et al (2019) offer useful starting points in understanding how outcomes are linked to institutionally embedded actors and their interactions.…”

Varieties of multi-stakeholder governance: selecting legitimation strategies in transnational sustainability politics

“…Non-state actors supply a growing proportion of the rules and regulations that govern the global economy, raising pressing questions about the legitimacy of transnational governance (McKeon, 2017;Wouters, Bijlmakers, Hachez, Lievens, & Marx, 2013). The existing literature on legitimacy and private governance falls fairly neatly into two camps: one normative, the other empirical in its orientation.…”

Judith Bessant, The Great Transformation: History for a Techno-Human Future

“…In the proposed imaginary institutional actors display a high degree of flexibility and self-awareness and can (implying both motivated and able to) change as much, and as quickly as societies and individuals do. This somewhat idealized framing of institutional structures however bypasses power-based understandings and bottom-up notions of socio-political transformation, democratization and change, specifically those that cannot be accounted (for) within normative institutional logics and in the language of capitalist modernity (see, e.g., Gilroy 1982Gilroy , 1987Gilroy , 1993Hall, 1980, Wouters et al, 2013. This is an important oversight, since not only do democratic contestations for knowledge and power from below often effectively diagnose social injustices but also fix accountability with those devising the rules of the game.…”