This chapter explores the following issues: key ethical and social challenges facing both companies and managers; the nature of ethical and institutional conflicts; hallmarks of ethical managerial behavior; laws and conventions on ethical behavior; and corporate environment-social-government initiatives aimed at giving back to global communities

Chapter three examines several selected instruments created to regulate SOEs at international, regional and domestic level and seeks to determine their effect on international law. At international level the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the OECD Guidelines on the Corporate Governance of State-Owned Enterprises, the OECD Common Approaches for Officially Supported Credits and Environmental and Social Due Diligence, the ILO Tripartite Declaration Concerning Multinational Enterprises, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Sovereign Wealth Funds Generally Accepted Principles and Practices and the Global Compact are particularly relevant for SOEs. At regional level, public procurement may represent a key regulatory opportunity for SOEs from a human rights perspective and to this end this section provides an analysis of the EU Public Procurement Directives. The section on domestic approaches to SOE regulation analyses measures that have been taken by several States to address the human rights dimension of State corporate ownership.

Transnational regulation of corporate behaviour is characterized by a multiplicity of reflexive norm-making processes in a variety of different forums, creating a web of corporate social responsibility (CSR) normativity in which relationing, cross-referencing but also contestation between bodies of norms become the rule rather than the exception. These interactions are particularly visible within a subset of CSR norms described as meta-regulatory, which often serve as focal points for entanglement. The chapter focuses on one such instrument – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The structure of the guidelines facilitates coordinated entanglement by including strategic openings and references to external bodies of norms. Moreover, the existence of OECD National Contact Points (the guidelines’ implementation mechanism) also enables more fluid and contingent interactions between bodies of norms, described in the chapter as ad hoc entanglement. By analysing both coordinated and ad hoc entanglement in relation to the OECD guidelines, the chapter identifies some of the dynamics which characterise the interactions between bodies of CSR norms. The resulting picture is nuanced, with entanglement being present in varying shades ranging from distancing to proximity.