🎥 Le Diable dans la bouteille des Codes de bonne conduite (The Devil in the bottle of Codes of Conduct)

  ► Full Reference: M.-A. Frison-Roche, "Le Diable dans la bouteille des Codes de bonne conduite"  (The Devil in the bottle of Codes of Conduct). Hommage to Gérard Farjat, Center of Economic Law, Nice, France, 10 March 2016 .

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  ► see the conference . (in French)

 ► see the  construction of this conference (in French)

  ► see the media/assets/slides/les-codes-de-bonne-conduite.pdf"> slides, used as basis for this conference (in French).

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  ► English presentation of this conference: In 1978, our mutual friend Gérard Farjat wrote a memorable article on "les codes de conduite privés" ('private codes of conduct') (in French), codes of conduct which have since flourished. I remember that it worried him because he was aware of the rhetoric, and even the contradiction, that these codes contain, and at the same time he did not see what could stop this legitimate way for international companies to organise an 'order' at home, since the Law was no longer able to offer them one from the outside, nor was Law capable of limiting the less virtuous tendency of companies to fashion norms by which they exercise power not only to organise themselves but also to govern others and the outside world.

When Gérard Farjat wrote this article in 1978, Corporate Social Responsibility had not yet been conceived...

Have we reached the same point? Can we even say that the situation has worsened, with the world being "standardised" and "governed" by "global" companies that write and impose codes of "good" conduct that express what is "good" in itself and end up constituting veritable "global constitutions"?

No. In fact, the opposite is true. Through the power of Regulators and Supervisors, institutions of public authority, public standards are internalised in "global" companies, which repeat them in codes of conduct and become their own regulators and supervisors.

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