Social licence and environmental protection: why businesses go beyond compliance

Neil Gunningham, Robert Kagan and Dorothy Thornton

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Traditionally, corporations which complied with the dictates of applicable legislation would have regarded not just their legal, but also their social obligations, as ending at that point. Socio-legal research suggests that corporations complied with law only for instrumental reasons (to avoid legal penalties) or, because "regulations are taken to be a measure of societal expectations, and [are] thus interpreted as a guide to an organisation's moral and social duties," (Wright, 1998: 14). From this traditional point of view, corporations could be expected to take actions which went 'beyond compliance' only where they saw some self-interest in doing so, such as increasing profit, usually over the short-term (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995)

JEL-codes: F3 G3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2002-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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