Corporate social responsibility in Asia

"Introduction JCC theme issue"

A Look at Corporate Code of Conduct Legislation

Over recent years, there has been a growing perception among civil society in the developed world that multinational corporations are engaged in socially and environmentally exploitative practices that they would never get away with, or even attempt, in their home countries. Whether right or wrong, that perception and its political and economic ramifications have driven a global movement for more responsible corporate behavior. As part of that global movement, three common law jurisdictions—the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom—have seen legislation introduced to enforce standards of practice for multinational corporations based in those countries in respect of their overseas activities. None of those Bills has yet passed into law, but they are worthy of analysis as attempts to transform hitherto amorphous concepts like 'corporate social responsibility' into concrete legislation. This article compares and critically analyses the three Bills, making recommendations as to how they could be improved, with particular emphasis on the need to forge stronger links between the legislative provisions and international human rights law.

Criminal responsibility based on complicity among corporate officers

In a 2001 Issues Paper entitled 'Sentencing: Corporate Offenders', the New South Wales Law Reform Commission outlined a number of reasons for not ascribing liability to individuals within a corporation for unlawful acts arising from the operation of the corporation. One of the reasons raised in the Issues Paper, a reason traditionally used to avoid liability being imposed on individuals for corporate crimes, is that it is conceptually difficult to look behind the form to the substance of a corporate crime in order to establish liability for individual acts, when on the surface the unlawful conduct was caused by a corporation as a collective body. In this article, the authors challenge this position by suggesting that the doctrine of complicity can be used to [*2] pierce the corporate veil and direct criminal liability to those individuals who control the actions of the company. This proposition that company officers can be found liable pursuant to the principles regarding accessorial responsibility is not novel. However, what is unusual is the infrequency with which this wide ranging doctrine is applied in the corporate setting. The focus of this article is to underline the relevance of this doctrine to corporate offenders and, in the process, to assert that the problems of punishing corporate offenders are in principle no different to punishing other crimes which are committed by more than the one offender and can be addressed by the proper application of existing legal principles.

Restructuring educational leadership in changing contexts: a local/global account of restructuring in Australia

The 1990s saw considerable structural reform in school education in many Anglophone nation states, marked by trends towards school-based, site-based, self-managing and self-governing schools. This article illustrates through a case study of educational restructuring in Victoria, Australia, how leadership, as a discursive practice, is redefined in the context of spatial and cultural restructuring. Restructuring produced a spatial redistribution of educational provision and individual opportunities as a result of structural adjustment reforms. These same policy moves towards post-welfarism also produced cultural shifts in attitudes to education with the rise of the new instrumentalism and entrepeneurialism. For school principals at the forefront of self managing schools, this meant shifts in resource distribution through new policy mechanisms of managerial and market accountability, and also new priorities impacting on leadership practices with a move from dialogic to decisional modes of management. The question is how recent policy moves towards learning networks and reinventing systematic support with a focus on locational disadvantage are addressing what were increased educational disparities between schools and students. Does this provide scope for more equity-driven leadership practices?

Accountants, ethical issues and the corporate governance context

A major survey of members of CPA Australia on the issue of ethics was recently conducted. A questionnaire was sent to 7,000 members at random, with those surveyed being asked whether they had come across any one of 14 ethical issues in the previous year. They were also asked to list the issues in order of importance as regards maintaining ethical standards, even if they had not been confronted by them.

Corporate financial disclosure practices in Asian and Middle Eastern countries

This paper investigates the financial disclosure practices of corporate annual reports published in Asian countries including Bangladesh, Indonesian, Malaysia and the Middle East countries including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The purpose of the study is to measure the financial disclosure diversity in these countries, with a view to developing a classification of their similarities and differences in respect to their compliance with International Accounting Standards (IAS). Annual reports of 126 public companies liisted on the countries' stock exchanges are the central data source, supplemented with other relevant information about financial disclosure practices in each country. A disclosure checklist adopted from all IASs and summarised in 306 individual items of financial disclosures is used as a means of extending an understanding of financial reporting in these countries. Results show the relative degree of conformity with IASs for each of the countries included in this study. 

Empirical evidence from the corporate collapse literature suggesting re-examination of accounting standards in relation to valuation of assets

This paper examines the recent spectacular corporate collapses of Parmalat in Europe, Enron and WorldCom in the USA and HIH in Australia and argues for a re-examination of corporate governance regulations, particularly in relation to accounting standards regarding the valuation of assets. The recommendation that is put forward in this regard is based upon empirical evidence arising from further examination of the empirical results in (Hossari and Rahman, 2004). Specifically, the recommendation is based upon the realization that, among the 48 financial ratios across the 50-plus refereed studies, five financial ratios, all of which contained assets as one of the variables, were a relatively robust indicator of corporate collapse. The five ratios are: Net Income/Total Assets, Current Assets/Current Liabilities, Total Liabilities/Total Assets, Working Capital/Total Assets, and Earnings Before Interest and Taxes/Total Assets. This paper suggests that it's not the failure of the corporate collapse prediction models, rather it's the erosion of the reliability of some key input data, namely assets and the valuation thereof, that is largely responsible for the apparent failure of these models in capturing impending collapses, such as those that we witnessed in the recent past. Such empirical findings support the argument that assets are soft targets for misrepresentation, because of the leeway granted in accounting standards with regards to their valuation.

Corporate donations, the best interest of the company and the proper purpose doctrine

Corporate philanthropy is illegitimate spending by powerful corporate elite of someone else’s money; an attempt to bypass democratic allocation of taxes; philanthropy by individuals is laudable, but not by corporations.

Just as I wouldn’t want you to implement your personal judgments by writing checks on my bank account for charities of your choice, I feel it inappropriate to write checks on your corporate ‘bank account’ for the charities of my choice.

Towards real shareholder participation in contemporary corporate governance

Enhanced shareholder participation in large public companies in Australia has not gone far enough.  Shareholders need to be given the opportunity to contribute to the forming of company decisions and strategies.  One proposal is to require that directors themselves be shareholders. A second proposal mandates shareholder committees in public companies.

Examining integrated advertising and sponsorship in corporate marketing through televised sport

To determine how integrated TV advertising and event sponsorship should be best managed and evaluated, a theoretical framework derived from global exploratory research of academic literature and consulting reports was validated by 16 experts. To benchmark the current practices against the best practice integration methods, 12 campaigns, which had sponsored a televised event and placed advertisements during the broadcast of the event, were analyzed via case studies. The investigated competitions included the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in London and the Olympic Games in Sydney. The examined brands comprised automotive, financial services, retail chain, office equipment, and consumer goods. A total of 24 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted-two for each case-one interview with an internal marketing executive from the promoted corporation, and a second with an external respondent from the advertising agency, event management organization, market research firm, or television channel. The study identified the key techniques that led to increased corporate sales-four steps and four objectives with necessary performance measures.

Removal of directors of public companies takes centre stage in Australia : an exploration of the corporate law and governance issues

Increasing attention is being given to the legal and governance issues relating to the removal of directors in Australian public companies. This has been due mainly to the difficulties experienced by the board of National Australia Bank in attempting to remove one of its fellow directors, and the subsequent development of public companies entering into so-called 'prenuptial agreements' with new directors, requiring that the director 'resign' if the board pass a vote of no-confidence in the director. In this article, the author revisits the area of director removal in Australian public companies for two reasons. The first reason, which covers the majority of the article, is to engage in a detailed analysis of whether the pre-nuptial agreements which some public companies have indicated that they support using to remove directors, are in fact enforceable under Australia's Corporations Act The second reason is to outline a law reform proposal to enable public companies to remove directors without requiring the vote of shareholders at a general meeting. The proposal involves providing Australia' corporate  regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) with the power to grant relief from the statutory removal provisions to public companies, but in a way which balances the competing objectives of commercial efficiency and shareholder participation and, very importantly, encourages good corporate governance practices by companies in relation to the performance assessment  of directors.

It is in the interests of both shareholders and directors to agree on a set of ground rules for the effective supervision of companies that reconciles the rights of the owners to overall control with the much tougher demands on modern directors

Methodological shifts in ratio-based modelling of corporate collapse

The year 1968 saw a major shift from univariate to multivariate methodological approaches to ratio-based modelling of corporate collapse. This was facilitated by the introduction of a new statistical tool called Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA). However, it did not take long before other statistical tools were developed. The primary objective for developing these tools was to enable deriving models that would at least do as good a job asMDA, but rely on fewer assumptions. With the introduction of new statistical tools, researchers became pre-occupied with testing them in signalling collapse. lLTUong the ratio-based approaches were Logit analysis, Neural Network analysis, Probit analysis, ID3, Recursive Partitioning Algorithm, Rough Sets analysis, Decomposition analysis, Going Concern Advisor, Koundinya and Purl judgmental approach, Tabu Search and Mixed Logit analysis. Regardless of which methodological approach was chosen, most were compared to MDA. This paper reviews these various approaches. Emphasis is placed on how they fared against MDA in signalling corporate collapse.