This chapter explores the intersection of transnational law with contemporary corporate governance laws and principles. Corporate governance, with its complex array of public and private actors, fits naturally within the modern concept of transnational law as a species of law that "can no longer be viewed through a purely national lens." Financial markets today are global and interconnected and events, such as the 2007-2009 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, exemplify the risk of contagion across those markets. Not only can corporate governance problems transcend national boundaries, so too can their solutions, which often involve regulatory efforts that operate at a transnational level. The chapter explores, from a transnational perspective, the transmission of laws and norms that are designed to constrain directors’ conduct and enhance corporate accountability. It focuses on two key examples of such accountability mechanisms-fiduciary duties and corporate codes. The chapter examines, for example, the global transmission of corporate governance and shareholder stewardship codes. These codes, which are a relatively recent phenomenon, play an important role as “norm creators.” The chapter assesses the transmission of laws and norms against the backdrop of convergence and path dependence theories of corporate governance.

We learn about what matters from exemplars. But we learn more from exemplars than we can be taught, and we know more about them than we can say. The challenge of articulating that knowledge is what drives scholarly inquiry forward. Our epistemological mythology confuses those efforts to express that knowledge propositionally with the knowledge itself. Propositional representations of our knowledge are the currency of scholarly debate; there is no alternative. These representations attempt to distill clusters of salient features that we perceive an exemplar as exemplifying, features that seem to us to matter most for our understanding of the relevant phenomenon. The more precisely we can render these features, the more they stand out and demand our attention. As we endeavor to produce ever finer-grained articulations, we inadvertently exclude other features, features which themselves might eventually emerge as salient and which thus call for fundamental revisions in how we represent what we know.

This chapter tests formally the legacies of military colonialism on attitudes and norms. Historical qualitative accounts suggest that centuries of restrictions on personal freedom, political rights, and the economic opportunities, alienated people from state institutions. Given the size of family clans, there were few opportunities for inter-clan interactions, which would have fostered horizontal solidarity in the form of reciprocity, cooperation, and equality. The longer existence of family clans in the former military colony made it very hard for the state to win the loyalty of the public, which in turn, endogenously strengthened family networks and distanced them from the central state. Modern-day surveys indicate that people living in the former colony are more attached to their family, trust outsiders less, are less politically engaged, and are more risk-averse.

This and the following chapters offer substantive applications of a relational/systemic understanding of international systems. This chapter looks at how international actors are differently placed (and shaped) by their authority, status, and roles; by the principles, norms, and rules that govern their actions; and by the institutions and practices in which they participate. The chapter offers three illustrations. First, I suggest that international systems can profitably be understood as having constitutional structures composed of principles and practices of international legitimacy, principles and practices of domestic legitimacy, foundational functional practices, and hegemonic cultural values. Second, I look at the great variety of types of security systems, including (various types of) systems organized around unit autonomy, systems of hierarchical subordination, and transnational security communities. Finally, I look at the transformation of post-World War II international society through norm-driven processes that abolished aggressive territorial war and overseas colonial empires.

This chapter advocates viewing the structures of international political systems through the lens of multiple dimensions of social differentiation; the structured processes by which social actors and positions are produced, populated, related, reproduced, and transformed. Social differentiation involves, at minimum, establishing who has what authority over whom with respect to which activities; that is, differentiating actors, activities, and authorities (which usually are complexly interrelated). And in addition to institutional and normative dimensions, which are notoriously excluded from the Waltzian account of structure, social differentiation has important material or geo-technical dimensions that are also ignored in the Waltzian account (which is not, as is often claimed, materialist). More generally, I argue that rather than seek to identify a small number of structural models composed of a few elements, we should aim for a checklist of dimensions of differentiation that illuminate some recurrently important features of the structures of some social and political systems of interest.

Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

The moral foundations of crisis response seem simple: responders save lives, reduce human suffering, and pursue a lofty societal goal. Yet, crises often produce morally complicated situations as well. Crisis organizations have adopted norms, which help responders to work in complex moral contexts, but these norms cause moral distress when responders do not fully agree with them. Responders can choose to deviate from the norms and follow their inner moral convictions instead. This will not remove the moral complexities of their work though. Rather, it means that crisis professionals have to resolve moral dilemmas on their own and bear the full weight of moral responsibility. The moral dilemma for responders concerns this tension between following organizational norms and their own convictions. In response, crisis organizations could pursue an ethical culture by promoting organizational deliberation on moral questions in crisis operations. Creating an ethical culture allows for an open, flexible attitude by enabling active dialogue and collective reflection on moral dilemmas in crises. It facilitates a confrontation with the inevitable moral discomforts of crisis response.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about constructivist-inspired norm theory. Pragmatism can contribute to a new wave of norm research, which focuses on how normativity (or appropriateness) is established and not just how norms change. Pragmatism finds normativity in experimental processes that test a norm’s ability to ameliorate the lived experience in social and political contexts (rather than in abstract theorizing). This requires a commitment to epistemic fallibilism, deliberation and inquiry. Drawing on the writings of Peirce and Dewey in particular, the chapter argues that this process can only resolve normative doubt and establish epistemic authority if the knowledge of those affected by a practice is included in the community of inquiry that establishes normativity. What Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’ emerges from this process, which can be used as a starting point for acting in uncertain situations and judging the relative strength of the alternatives offered in processes of norm contestation. The chapter relates this argument to important contributions to norm theory, including the Habermasian-inspired ‘logic of arguing’ and Antje Wiener’s ‘theory of contestation’. It illustrates the Pragmatist contribution with reference to the debate on the anti-torture norm.

Three theoretical traditions dominate our understanding of decision-making. The rational actor model assumes individuals are self-interested and maximize their utility subject to budget and time constraints. When outcomes depend on the decisions of others, as in the problem of common pool resources, trust and norms can avoid support sustainability. Social psychological models examine the role of values, especially altruism and self-interest, beliefs, norms, identity, emotions, empathy and trust in decision-making. The heuristics and biases literature shows that decisions are often based on mental shortcuts that deviate from the rational actor model. Our tendency towards biased uptake of new information and communicating mostly with those similar to us can lead to polarization. The three theories can be viewed as complementary: each yields important insights into decision-making.

Multiple strategies can be used to influence individual decisions. A common assumption is that a lack of information, an information deficit, leads to poor decisions. While that is sometimes true, since decisions are shaped by both facts and values, providing information is often insufficient to change decision-making. The rational actor model suggests that changing incentives, and in particular changing prices, will shift decisions. Incentives matter, but they are only one factor in decisions and shifting incentives can be inequitable. Values are difficult to change but have broad and long-lasting influence on decisions. Norms are relatively easy to change and can have substantial influence. Design principles, generalizations from research on decision-making, can help shape effective efforts to influence decisions. Policies and programs should be designed with the consent of and in collaboration with those who may be impacted by the decision.

This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.

This chapter explores and develops the concept of typicality and atypicality both generally and specifically in terms of reference. Existing literature on reference established our core understanding of referring, forming the basis for how we view reference. However, evidence has largely been experimental, computational, philosophical, and/or based on small excerpts. This chapter then sets out the distinction we would like to make on the division between typical and atypical uses. We argue for a view of typicality as conventionalised language use, which can be said to fall within the norms of a given register. Atypicality, conversely includes instances of language which can be said to be infrequent and unconventionalised for a given register. The chapter focusses on existing models of reference which provide an excellent grounding in typical uses of reference through which we can explore the (in)stability of identifiability and view atypical reference as an exploitation of conventionalised norms.

Computational work on morality has emerged from two major sources – empirical moral science and philosophical ethics. Moral science has revealed a diversity of moral phenomena: moral behavior (including moral decision making), moral judgments, moral emotions, moral sanctions, moral communication. Philosophical ethics has long focused on moral decision making, and this is where most of the computational work has emerged. Much of it uses rule-based systems rooted in formal logic but is complemented by connectionist, case-based, and other approaches, and more recently by reinforcement learning models. Computational work on moral judgments is sparser, in part because moral judgments build on numerous complex mental capacities, such as causal and counterfactual reasoning and theory of mind. Nonetheless, some models of blame judgments have emerged that draw on information processing approaches from empirical moral science. Even less work has tackled moral emotions, sanctions, and communication – phenomena that present vast challenges and opportunities for future work.