As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

In this chapter, we examine the measurement issues that currently plague analysis of corporate political activity and that must be remedied for CPR to be credible, with a focus on the federal level. We begin with issues of electoral spending before turning to spending on lobbying. In each case, we survey the laws mandating disclosure of these activities, along with what some firms and third parties are doing to shed light on activities that fall outside these reporting requirements. We then discuss the questions that can be answered with existing data, and the important questions that are impossible to answer due to data gaps. Finally, we discuss changes to current laws, and to norms of corporate behavior, that could increase transparency and accountability around corporate political activity.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first provides an overview of the Age of Aspirations, from approximately the 1780s to the 1920s. This period was marked by an intense exploration of arbitration in all its forms. In private relations, arbitration was commonly used to settle commercial disputes, for example through the many trade associations in Europe. In the public arena, when used among states, arbitration was seen as a way of fostering peace and stability. The Age of Aspirations lasted until the 1920s, when arbitral institutions were founded, the importance of merchants and statesmen yielded to that of members of these arbitral institutions, and various efforts were made to recognize the validity of arbitration clauses. The second section of this chapter is more theoretical and looks at how a history of international commercial arbitration may be written. It explores various historical methods and approaches, and draws attention to methodological pitfalls that may be encountered when studying the history of international arbitration, especially its distant origins.

To satisfy an industrialising and industrialised Britain, huge quantities of ‘soft’ commodities - grain, cotton, coffee, cocoa, sugar and palm oil – were grown, harvested and transported from North America, the steppes of Russia, Asia, Africa and the southern hemisphere for sale on the commodity markets of London and Liverpool. Sales of commodities in the first part of the nineteenth century were by dealings on physical markets and by auction. Trade associations like the London Corn Trade Association formed from the mid-nineteenth century had as a major aim the formulation of standard form contracts to govern the international sale of these commodities. Sale in this way need not be on physical markets or by auction, but could be at a distance. These standard form contracts modified the default rules of sales law. They are the precursors of contracts used world-wide today. Although governed by English law, they were adopted internationally. Traders in other countries had an input into their formulation. In drawing them up trade association members took the lead, with lawyers ‘on tap, not on top’. Disputes were settled by arbitration provided in the contract, and relatively few reached the courts. Untoward court decisions were remedied by redrafting the contracts.