The Chair co-organised, with Stephan Leixnering (WU Vienna) and Jeroen Veldman (Nyenrode Business Universiteit), the 3rd international workshop on Profit-with-Purpose Corporations (PPC), entitled “Governance Fit for Purpose”.
It brought together twelve internationally renowned scholars working on corporate governance and purpose commitments, as well as two practitioners: Emery Jacquillat, European ambassador of the Communauté des Entreprises à Mission, and Michael Ristaniemi, Policy & Legal Officer at the European Commission (DG GROW).
The workshop started from the observation that a growing variety of legal options is emerging to protect corporate projects aiming to contribute to social and environmental transitions. How can these alternative governance forms, which sometimes coexist in the same country, be compared systematically? To what extent are they tied to cultural or legal contexts? Do they offer different or complementary guarantees in terms of fairness, responsibility and accountability? And how far can they address current societal challenges?
A second set of questions addressed the theoretical implications of such a diversification of governance structures: how can this variety be explained, and to what extent does it challenge current concepts of governance?