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Extending the Frontiers of Responsible Corporate Governance: Exploring Legitimacy Issues of Multi-stakeholder Initiatives

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Responsible Corporate Governance

Part of the book series: CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ((CSEG))

Abstract

As a novel way of collaborative governance governments, non-governmental organizations and companies increasingly coordinate the design, implementation and monitoring of rules and standards in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Since these private governance arrangements are not equally well-embedded in established democratic mechanisms as regulation through governmental bodies, it is important to investigate their legitimacy. This chapter aims to critically investigate, refine, and extend the criteria for assessing the legitimacy of MSIs in the realm of CSR as posited by scholars Sébastien Mena and Guido Palazzo. While the authors shed light on MSI legitimacy by distinguishing between input and output legitimacy, they seem to ignore several relevant legitimacy aspects and adopt a classification that may obscure important characteristics of MSI legitimacy. This chapter suggests several refinements and extensions to the Mena and Palazzo framework by arguing for the inclusion of the dimension of throughput legitimacy and proposing an adjusted set of MSI legitimacy criteria. Several of the arguments made in this chapter are illustrated by looking at ISO 26000, the global standard for social responsibility.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The criterion of actor coverage should not be confused with the previously suggested homonymous input legitimacy criterion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, Antwerp Management School, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Lars Moratis

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  1. Lars Moratis
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Correspondence to Lars Moratis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Theory, Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland

    Maria Aluchna

  2. Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law, London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom

    Samuel O. Idowu

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Moratis, L. (2017). Extending the Frontiers of Responsible Corporate Governance: Exploring Legitimacy Issues of Multi-stakeholder Initiatives. In: Aluchna, M., Idowu, S. (eds) Responsible Corporate Governance. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55206-4_7

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