Corporate social responsibility (CSR), based on the concept of sustainable development, was defined in the Brundtland Report as “development that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). It involves many legal and extra-legal standards. In this research project we evaluate the process of creating standards, particularly those that build on the UN principles of CSR, and that take shape through management practices and new procedures standardization legal construction. Our aim is to identify the normative references – norms, values, principles, discourses – involved in the practices analyzed to understand the behaviour of and relationships between actors and to establish a genealogy.

In Europe and North America, the idea of social justice is closely associated with the issue of discrimination. The fight against discrimination in employment in particular, is a major social policy concern. In the social sciences, there are important studies on discriminatory practices. Legal mechanisms to combat discrimination have been developed at different rates in different countries or regions, but in broadly similar ways. There is limited national comparative research on the interactions that develop between law and practicing managers.
The assumption behind the project is that the rise of academic discourses and practice-oriented diversity policies are at the heart of interactions that are formed between legal norms and managerial norms. They reflect a desire to simultaneously avoid and overcome the application of anti-discriminatory norms and rules. The exact scope of these practices remains difficult to measure. However, it is important to decipher events, both in terms of how the classifications are developed from minority groups, as well as their influence on the ‘rules of the games’ in legal disputes. The law provides a ‘floor of entitlements’ for citizens but the experience of discrimination often takes subtle forms, which are difficult to evidence in a manner that would satisfy the law courts. It could be argued that in the main laws that would appear to be developed to protect the individual in theory, protect the interests of the firm, in practice.
How can the theory, statute and practices of law be developed in manner that would be regarded by stakeholders, and the traditionally disadvantaged in particular, as ‘just’? How might the evolving challenges of minorities, and evolving forms of discrimination in the labour market and in firms be made more visible through legal gaze? What are, and what should be, the limits of legal interventions? How might the law enable firms to be better citizens, and line managers, better representatives of the firm, with regards to the diversity agenda?
The Group focuses on the manifestations of political diversity within the firm through a multidisciplinary examination of professional standards (for example, corporate charters and agreements, branch agreements, diversity classification systems, dissemination of “best practice”). The aim is to evaluate the legal scope of, and contribution to, the goal of social justice.

The extension of the influence of managerial knowledge is driven into the public domain by the neoliberal ideology. This movement is all the greater since it is relayed by influential international institutions, European and global, and exacerbated by the globalization of the economy. Management is becoming a widely shared and legitimated body of knowledge. Nevertheless, management is not only a body of knowledge on organizational performance. It is knowledge about internal government of organizations and about society as well, through marketing and work force management.
Our research in this area focuses on the relationship between business and society, through the relations that management creates with employees. The research also explored individual and collective experiences of transformation of these relations in the sense of professional autonomy. They are intended to identify legal and managerial issues from these experiences.
The current work focuses professional mobility within and outside the organization, as well as the inter-paradigmic interaction and influence on norms that originate within law and management.

New Public Management (NPM) is designed to make a clean sweep of the administrative model which can be described as Weberian, and which presents itself as a set of universal principles (independent from the pressures of politics and business influences, rule of law and “public service culture”). It has been asserted by some that the NPM model is better than traditional administrative models because of its bureaucratic inertia, its lack of innovation and absence ‘assessment’, traditional approaches are unable to meet the evolving needs of the society.
To correct these deficiencies, NPM promotes control in the broad sense, entrusted to experts deemed competent to evaluate the performance by actors through the use of targets. Control is then analyzed in terms of means-ends fit and performance, rather than in terms of satisfaction of general interest or common good.
NPM may be regarded both as a toolbox of management, in which each government can draw on its way, and as a set of universal principles (the public service must be satisfied both by private and public traditions; in a situation of quasi-market competition, provision of services must be separate from its control so that any service can be outsourced should be; service performance should be evaluated in terms of multiple indicators). Then, from a legal point of view concerned with the theory of State (or: from point of v. of the legal scholar interested in theory of State), New Public Management does appear to promote a particular model of State.
This project does not attempt to assess the relevance of the New Public Management’s response to the alleged evils of “Old” Public Management, but aims to put into perspective the legal issues, managerial and philosophical conflict between them, and their implications for democracy. These two doctrines are therefore treated as a set of requirements concerning the organization of the State, and will be investigated as constitutive of certain forms of exercise of power.