Lilian Moncrieff (University of Glasgow – School of Law) has posted On the Company's Bounded Sense of Social Obligation (in Law, Obligation, Community, edited by Scott Veitch and Dan Matthews, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The chapter routes through sites of demise and expulsion, sweatshops and distressed ecologies, to say something about the harms, repressions, and tragedies that lurk in the recesses of corporate networks. It uncovers parts and existences that corporate costings repeatedly leave out, and that form into deposits and accumulations of neglected beings and things under the surfaces of law. A critical feature of these sub-surface deposits is that they are depleted in their ability to generate obligations, an effect traced by the author to the company’s bounded and managerial mode of interaction with the world. The chapter grapples with a response to the situation, calling for new tools and juridical concepts to trace the existences that fall between the lines of corporate social obligation. It makes its own attempt at this technology with a temporally orientated view of the company’s relations: impacts and ties difficult to sense in the present acquire a different kind of presence over time, and might catalyse obligation, as such. The chapter introduces ‘legacy’ and ‘le-geology’ as tools to ‘make sense’ of the many distributed parts to corporate action. Their aim is to extend obligation to forgotten and suffering parts of corporate networks.