The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere?

With the advent of globalization - where corporate organizations and the commercial relations that accompany them are argued to be becoming increasingly transnational - the locus of powers, authorities, and responsibilities has shifted to the global level. The nation-state arena is losing its capacity to regulate and control commercial processes and practices as a transformational logic kicks-in, associated with new forms of global rule-making and governance. It is this new arena of global rule-making that can be considered as a surrogate form of global constitutionalization, or 'quasi-constitutionalization'. But as might be expected, this surrogate process of constitutionalization is not a coherent system or set of rounded outcomes but full of contradictory half-finished currents and projects: an 'assemblage' of many disparate advances and often directionless moves - almost an accidental coming together of elements. It is this assemblage that is to be investigated and unbundled by the analysis of the book. The book discusses governance, law, and constitutional matters in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. It examines how and why the business world, commercial relations, and company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level. It analyses how we should characterize the process that has seen the international corporate arena increasingly subject to juridical and constitutional-like regulatory initiatives and interventions and whether this amounts to a new attempt to subject international commercial relations to the 'rule of law' and, indeed, to rule the world through these very means.

1. Setting the Scene. 2. The Contours of Constitutionalization. 3. Global Corporate Citizenship Examined. 4. The Politics of the 'Citizenly Company' and Global Corporate Governance Reform. 5. Global Administrative Law, the OECD, and International Investment. 6. Consequences of Quasi-Constitutionalization for the Global Regulatory Agenda and the Fate of the Rule of Law.

Grahame F. Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and Emeritus Professor at the Open University in England. His research and teaching interests have been in international political economy matters, particularly in respect to the issue of globalization. Recently he has re-focussed on the role of business organization in the context of international economic matters, dealing with questions of international law, global corporate citizenship, and the future of corporate governance.