The introduction explains why the boundary between business decisions and social decisions has eroded. Corporate operations now shape speech, safety, health, and democratic life as a direct result of scale, efficiency, and automation.

The introduction explains why familiar responses fail. Shareholder primacy breaks down when investors disagree about corporate purpose. Stakeholder approaches identify affected groups but offer no way to resolve conflict. Calls for neutrality ignore the reality that operational choices already function as social policy.

The introduction presents the book's core claim. Corporations have built governance systems to manage social conflict because no other institution can respond quickly enough. These systems are not symbolic commitments. They are operational structures that allow firms to set standards, justify decisions, and revise practices over time.

It introduces corporate ordering and previews the tripartite framework that organizes the book. It explains the role of the case studies and situates the project within debates about corporate power, regulation, and democratic legitimacy.

Today many have predicted the death of environmental, social, and governance (ESG). Alas, even amidst such predictions, there remains considerable confusion about ESG’s meaning. Some view ESG as synonymous with corporate social responsibility or stakeholderism, others view ESG as a mechanism for assessing risks; some characterize ESG as political, others view ESG as inextricably aligned with business goals. The lack of consensus around ESG’s meaning makes assessing its demise complex. On the one hand, any future version of ESG will be incompatible with alternative – and strongly held – conceptions of ESG, confirming predictions of ESG’s demise while ensuring that ESG’s future will be plagued by controversy and discontent. Nonetheless, there is a version of ESG that is both sustainable because it focuses on economic risks and opportunities, and also beneficial because it may move the needle on improving shareholder value while positively impacting critical social issues.

Prevailing stereotypes depict the corporate laws of developing countries as either antiquated or plagued by problems of enforcement and misfit despite formal convergence. This chapter offers a different view by showing how Global South jurisdictions have pioneered heterodox stakeholder approaches in corporate law. Examples of those approaches include the erosion of limited liability for purposes of stakeholder protection in Brazil and India, the adoption of mandatory corporate social responsibility in Indonesia and India, and a large-scale program of Black corporate ownership and empowerment in South Africa, among many others. By incorporating broader public policy and distributional objectives into corporate law, heterodox stakeholderism can be interpreted as an institutional adaptation to a context of high inequality and externalities that remain unaddressed through other areas of law. As the rise of inequality and growing distrust of the state’s ability to tackle social and environmental concerns have brought the Global North closer to the Global South’s realities, the resurgent interest in stakeholderism in the developed world constitutes a surprising form of “reverse convergence” that merits greater attention. Heterodox stakeholderism in the Global South also responds to critical, but heretofore neglected, distributional implications of corporate law rules.

Finance that does not take sustainability seriously is finance that does not take finance seriously. The financial risks of continued unsustainabilities bring sustainability issues into the heart of any well-founded financial decision, whatever view one might have on the role of finance and business in society. In this chapter, the relationship between finance and sustainability is explored through a broadening of the approach to understanding financial risks of unsustainability. This goes beyond the established recognition of the financial risks of climate change – and the emerging recognition of financial risks of biodiversity loss. The analysis presents new risk categories, including the risk of business model change, societal risk and global catastrophic risks. The chapter also exemplifies new categories of unsustainability that should be encompassed in such a broader and systemic approach, including ‘novel entities’ and tax evasion. The chapter concludes with brief reflections on the necessity of and the legal basis for implementing a research-based approach to risks of unsustainability in law and policy reforms and in practice.