What is Codes of Best Practices

Most recently, the world has witnessed a spectacular increase in the size and number of Transnational Corporations (TNCs); an explosion that has resulted in the overseas practices of such companies coming under intense scrutiny, and in the realisation that governments often lack the resources necessary to ensure TNC compliance to international standards in key areas such as labour rights, environmental pollution, and social justice. Against the backdrop of significant failure in national- and international-level attempts to administer Transnational Corporations, this research chapter will examine the effectiveness of codes of ethical corporate conduct devised to enhance the regulation of corporate behaviour. The research presented herein focuses on the conceptualisation of such regulatory mechanisms, and their relationship to the larger corpus of corporate social, commercial, and ethical strategic interactions; evaluating their effectiveness as instruments of privatised governance through the particular examination of corporate stakeholder behaviour and recent examples of global best practice.