TRANSCORP : Transnational Corporations and the Shifting Boundaries of Justice
Subsidised by the European Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, which funds young researchers, this project is managed by Martin Giraudeau, for a period of two years (2021-2023) [legal information].
SUMMARY :
TRANSCORP aims to advance our understanding of the changing interface between business and society by analyzing the judicialisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – a phenomenon that is increasingly observed in the European Union, and notably in France, where the recent adoption of the ‘duty of vigilance’ law has opened the prospect that transnational corporations could be sued by third-parties for not taking sufficiently into account the risks generated by industrial activities across their production chains. While CSR had long been considered a matter of voluntary issue for private businesses, the on-going hardening of soft law remains an under-researched topic.
This project aims to address this gap, by exploring how the agencies of a variety of state and non-state actors – such as transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), supranational institutions (EU, OECD) – intersect at different levels in the production of transnational legal cases that encapsulate competing claims for justice. The main contribution of TRANSCORP will be to investigate this ‘judicialisation turn’ as mirroring the overarching institutional significance that TNCs have acquired in a world power system that has become increasingly fragmented. This will help us to develop a fine-grained description of how the ‘hybrid sovereignty’ that these private entities had consolidated for themselves in a few decades of globalization has become more and more contested as human societies are faced with both an explosion of social inequality and a worrying disruption of planetary equilibriums.
LEGAL INFORMATION
Objectives : TRANSCORP aims to develop a scientific analysis of the duty of vigilance law. Participating is completely voluntary.
Data controller : Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, CNRS / SciencesPo.
Data recipients (researchers who access to the data) : Pierre-Louis Choquet
Category of data processed : Qualitative data generated through semi-structured interviews
Data protection measures : Audio files and transcripts will always be stored under anonymous names in encrypted files protected with robust passwords, and will not be circulated
Risk for participants : The main risk consists in the theft/loss of the main researcher’s PC on the field, and of a data breach. Access to field data stored in the laptop will be protected with robust passwords. The dissemination of the findings of the research will always secure the anonymity of the participants.
Data archive and duration : The data will be anonymized and encrypted by the main researcher and kept secure until 2024 (i.e., two years after the termination of the research project) on SciencesPo research repository.
GDPR rights : In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, any person will be able to access their data, as well as remove it if possible. To do so, he/she will send an email to pierrelouis.choquet@sciencespo.fr and to the laboratory. In case of difficulty, please contact the Sciences Po Data Protection Officer cnil@sciencespo.fr. If your question is not answered properly, you can address a complaint to the French data protection authority (the CNIL).
Sciences Po is committed to ensure the respect of the European and French data protection principles by its current and future employees, researchers or eventual processors associated with the data.
