Social Enterprise

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In my posts last Thursday (see here and here) and in others, I have explained why I don’t think that the Dodd-Frank conflicts minerals law is the right way to force business to think more carefully about their human rights impacts.  I have also blogged about the non-binding UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which have influenced both the Dodd-Frank rule, the EU’s similar proposal, and the State Department’s required disclosures for businesses investing in Burma (see here). 

For the past few months, I have been working on an article outlining one potential solution.  But I was dismayed, but not surprised to read last week that the US government’s procurement processes may be contributing to the very problems that it seeks to prevent in Bangladesh and other countries with poor human rights records. This adds a wrinkle to my proposal, but my contribution to the debate is below:

Faced with less than optimal voluntary initiatives and in the absence of binding legislation, what mechanisms can interested stakeholders use as leverage to force corporations to take a more proactive role in safeguarding human rights, particularly due diligence issues in the supply chain?  Can new disclosure…

Dolf Diemont, Aloy Soppe & Kyle Moore have posted “Corporate Social Responsibility and Downside Equity Tail Risk” on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This paper assesses the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and downside equity tail risk – a field of research that has so far been neglected – using world wide data for the period 2003-2011. Tail risk is estimated using Extreme Value Theory. Corporate Social Responsibility is approached using stakeholder theory. The results show that there are significant relationships between CSR and tail risk. These relationships are tested for robustness using a heterogeneous and homogeneous tail index, raw returns and idiosyncratic returns, and various values for the tail threshold. The relationships we found are sequential, which makes a causal relationship between CSR and tail risk plausible.

Hao Liang & Luc Renneboog have posted “The Foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility” on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

We investigate the roles of legal origins and political institutions – believed to be the fundamental determinants of economic outcomes – in corporate social responsibility (CSR). We argue that CSR is an essential path to economic sustainability, and document strong correlations between country-level sustainability ratings and various extensive firm-level CSR ratings with global coverage. We contrast the different views on how legal origins and political institutions affect corporations’ tradeoff between shareholder and stakeholder rights. Our empirical evidence suggest that: (a) Legal origins are more fundamental sources of CSR adoption and performance than firms’ financial and operational performance; (b) Among different legal origins, the English common law – widely believed to be mostly shareholder-oriented – fosters CSR the least, (c) Within the civil law countries, firms of countries with German legal origin outperform their French counterparts in terms of ecological and environmental policy, but the French legal origin firms outperform German legal origin companies in social issues and labor relations.Companies under the Scandinavian legal origin score highest on CSR (and all its subfields); (d) Political institutions – democratic rules…

Alicia Plerhoples is leading an innovative Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center.  She presented her “Representing Social Enterprise” article at AALS in 2013, and her article was recently published by the Clinical Law Review.  I recommend the article to all those interested in social enterprise and/or clinical education.  The article will be helpful to the academic, practitioner, and clinician (perhaps because Professor Plerhoples has experience in all three roles).   “Representing Social Enterprise” includes a deep discussion of the models of social enterprise, thoughtful analysis of the corporate governance issues that are likely to arise when representing social enterprises, and interesting insights into Georgetown’s clinic. 

The abstract is reproduced below and the entire article can be found on SSRN here:

“This article explores the representation of social enterprises — i.e., nonprofit and for-profit organizations whose managers strategically and purposefully work to create social, environmental, and economic value or achieve a social good through business techniques — in the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. The choice to represent social enterprise clients facilitates a curriculum that explicitly focuses on the business models, governance tools, and legal mechanisms that these organizations use…

Here, Professor Bainbridge kindly asks for my thoughts on Keith Paul Bishop’s article Would Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Have A Stronger Case As A Flexible Purpose Corporation?   

I agree with Bishop’s conclusion that the question is still open.  Both the Flexible Purpose Corporation (“FPC“) and the Benefit Corporation version of social enterprise legal forms are quite new and each became available in California as of January 1, 2012.  The FPC is only available in California (though Washington state’s social purpose corporation is similar in many respects) and the Benefit Corporation legislation has passed in 20 U.S. jurisdictions (19 states and Washington D.C.), starting with Maryland in 2010.  As the name suggests, the FPC allows managers more flexibility in choosing their particular corporate purpose(s), whereas most of the Benefit Corporation statutes require a “general public benefit purpose” to benefit “society and the environment” when “taken as a whole” but also allow additional “specific public benefit purpose(s).”  Delaware’s version of the benefit corporation law (called a “public benefit  corporation”) requires the choosing of one or more specific public benefit purposes.  

Converting to an FPC or a Benefit Corporation, without more, likely would not be much help to…

On December 5th and 6th I attended and presented at the third annual Sustainable Companies Project Conference at the University of Oslo.  The project, led by Beate Sjafjell began in 2010 and attempts to seek concrete solutions to the following problem:

Taking companies’ substantial contributions to climate change as a given fact, companies have to be addressed more effectively when designing strategies to mitigate climate change. A fundamental assumption is that traditional external regulation of companies, e.g. through environmental law, is not sufficient. Our hypothesis is that environmental sustainability in the operation of companies cannot be effectively achieved unless the objective is properly integrated into company law and thereby into the internal workings of the company.  

Members of the Norwegian government, the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”), and the United Nations Environmental Programme  (UNEP) Finance Initiative also presented with academics and practitioners from the US, Europe, Asia and Africa.

I did not participate in the first two conferences, but was privileged this year to present my paper entitled “Climate Change and Company Law in the United States: Using Procurement, Pay and Policy Changes to Influence Corporate Behavior.” The program and videos of…

After meeting Colin Mayer (Oxford) and hearing him present at Vanderbilt’s 2013 Law and Business Conference, I purchased and read his recent book, Firm Commitment: Why the Corporation is Failing Us and How to Restore Trust in it.  The book is organized in three parts: (1) how the corporation is failing us; (2) why it is happening; (3) what we should do about it.  While the first two parts contain some helpful background and interesting case studies, I found the third part the most useful.  In the third part, Professor Mayer suggests:

These three straightforward adaptations of current arrangements – establishing corporate values, permitting the creation of a board of trustees to act as their custodians, and allowing for time dependent shares – together solve the fundamental problems of breaches of trust in relation to current and future generations. (pg. 247) 

In discussing corporate values, Professor Mayer writes:

Corporate social responsibility was rightly dismissed as empty rhetoric and jettisoned when recession forced a return to more traditional shareholder value.  Why should I trust an organization that is owned and controlled by anonymous, opportunistic, self-interested wealth seekers?  Without commitment, there is no reason why there should be any trust

…

Given my interest in social enterprise, many friends and colleagues e-mailed me Professor Steven Davidoff’s recent article in the New York Times DealBook about Make a Stand,  a company founded by then eight-year old Vivienne Harr that sells “all-natural, certified organic, U.S. grown/Fair-Trade, GMO-free” lemonade and donates 5% of gross revenue to organizations focused on ending child slavery. 

As Professor Davidoff mentions, Make a Stand is organized as a social purpose corporation in Washington state.  Social purpose corporations are one of the many “social enterprise” legal forms that have arisen in the U.S. over the past five years, along with benefit corporations, benefit LLCs, flexible purpose corporations, L3Cs, public benefit corporations, and sustainable business corporations. 

While these new legal forms have been grouped under the term “social enterprise,” the term “social enterprise” is not well defined in the literature. 

The Social Enterprise Alliance (the “SEA”) defines “social enterprise” through a tripartite test:

  1. Directly addresses social need;
  2. Commercial activity [not donations] drives revenue; and
  3. Common good is the primary purpose.

The recent “social enterprise” statutes, however, do not expressly require products or services of social enterprises to directly address social need in the way described by the…