Programme Director: Simon Deakin

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Project: Ethics, Regulation and Globalisation

Project leaders: Michael Pollitt (Judge Business School) and Ian Jones (Lincoln College, Oxford and Herriot Watt Business School)
Research Assistants: Aoife Brophy (EPRG)
Project dates: 1999-2010
Funding: ESRC (core grant to CBR)

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Update on progress: November 2010

Aims and Objectives

This project is examining the relationship between globalisation, business ethics and the development of regulatory policy in a number of contexts. Recent work has focused on the contribution of multinational companies to the creation of social capital and on strategies for achieving decarbonisation.

Results and Dissemination

During 2010 we completed a working paper suggesting that engaging individuals and changing norms of behaviour will be crucial if substantial decarbonisation is to be achieved and if the full costs of climate change and related development challenges are to be willingly met by societies around the world. Engaging individuals and changing norms fundamentally relate to individual moral values. This brings us to a consideration of how organised religion can play a role in providing the moral basis for individual action in this area. We also suggested implications for how business will need to engage with the challenges posed by decarbonisation. Our discussion links the underlying ethical issues raised by The Economics of Climate Change (Stern, 2007) with Vandenbergh's (2005) emphasis on the need for 'personal norm activation' to engage individuals in protecting the environment.

We also completed a major working paper on high street retailers' climate strategies, developing our earlier CBR work on social capital building by multinationals. This work was funded by the ESRC and hosted in the Electricity Policy Research Group. We used a social capital approach to firstly measure best practice in the climate strategies of a sample of 60 companies. We then measured the differences in engagement with partner organisations across the same set of companies. Using our best practice and partnership indices, we investigate how committed companies are to climate strategies; how partnerships have an impact on best practice; and we try to understand the distinction between companies that are more and less highly engaged in partnering. We find that partnership has an important role to play; and specifically that higher levels of partner diversity and greater depth of engagement improve the impact of partnership on best practice.