1.7 New roles claimed by private actors

As Albert Einstein observed, Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving'. Indeed, society is continuously changing and business always has to search for a modus operandus in a changing environment. Consumers change their preferences, resources may become depleted, legislation regarding a certain product might change, and one day it might be difficult to find skilled personnel. New problems and challenges emerge, others are being solved. Where international conflicts previously concerned the chosen domestic economic and political model, they now concern religious notions and the search for resources, energy and water.1 The internet brought global connection and transparency. New ethical standards are in progress, as ethics always have been. Companies consist of people and these people are influenced by the changes around them. Consequentialy, companies are also in motion at all times and adjust to changing environments. One of the adjustments of the last decade is the embracing of CSR by many European and American companies,2i.e. they indicate in their annual reports or sustainability reports, on their websites or on product labels that they endeavour to be or to become a sustainable operating company. Sustainability is truely a buzz word. Some companies mean that they organise their business in a way that it does not harm people or the environment, others explain that they wish to be good for people and the environment and even aim at contributing to solving the world's major challenges, and a third category indicates that they put the continuity of the company in the first place and consider that to be sustainable behaviour. Nonetheless, any public communication by a company that it pursues sustainability sets employees and consumers in motion.

The corporate motivation for embracing sustainability is fourfold:

However, as has been argued above, CSR is not a defined term and has no fixed meaning. Various questions emerge: what will change and is changing in doing business when taking on CSR? How does it work to implement ethical standards in an MNC that operates in very different cultural environments? Will there be one set of standards or multiple sets? Do these standards have to concur with local standards or could there be deviations? Since legal systems differ around the globe, another question that emerges is whether a company pursues responsible conduct if it just' complies with the local laws of the country in which it does business? Or should it always adhere to the standards which it has to apply in its home country? These types of questions make it rather difficult to concretely establish what CSR exactly entails for a single company. However, companies themselves seem to have an understanding of what they can do and how they can contribute, maybe not a clear understanding but at least a practical modus in which to operate and from which to further build best practices in this field. Nonetheless, the author points at Porter's recommendation: if business would develop this practical modus into an embedded structural modus, the implementation of CSR can generate opportunities, innovation, and competitive advantage'. The following sections will introduce the main discussion themes of this book, i.e. the legal and semi-legal frameworks and processes that can assist business in implementing CSR.