The adoption by companies of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies is routinely characterised as voluntary. But if CSR is self-governance by business, it is self-governance that has received a firm push from external social and market forces, from forces of social accountability. Law is also playing a more significant role than the image of CSR suggests, and this legal accountability - the focus of the book - is set to increase. Legal intervention should not, however, be seen as making social accountability redundant. Wider ethical standards and social and market forces are also necessary to make legal regulation effective. Law is being brought into play in innovative and indirect ways. The initiative lies as much with private organizations as with the state. At the same time governments are using social and market forces to foster CSR. In the context of corporate social responsibility, a new, multi-faceted, corporate accountability is emerging.

In a time when multinational corporations have become truly globalised, demands for global standards on their behaviour are increasingly difficult to dismiss. Work conditions in sweatshops, widespread destruction of the environment, and pharmaceutical trials in third world countries are only the tip of the iceberg. This timely collection of essays addresses the interface between the calls for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the demands for an extension of international human rights standards. Scholars from a vast variety of backgrounds provide expert yet accessible accounts of questions of law, politics, economics and international relations and how they relate to one another, while also encouraging non-legal perspectives on how businesses operate within and around human rights. The result is an essential incursion for a wide range of scholars, practitioners and students in law, development, business studies and international studies, in this emerging area of human rights.