Beyond the Market for Virtue, Book Review Example

This chapter focuses on factors beyond market virtue and includes human rights and other environmental practices in the firm.  According to this chapter, the provision of voluntary standards for labor force and human rights began in America and Europe in the early 1990s. Civil regulation practices have led to improvement in health and safety working conditions, low child labor, use of environmental friendly practices and production of cost-effective and high-quality products. It is also evident that modern civil regulations have led to low prices for AIDS drugs in a number of developing countries globally. This indicates the importance of CSR and market virtue practices.  Social labels such as Fair Trade, FSC and Rugmark should improve their voluntary and labor standards monitoring and enforcement procedures despite their limited and small market shares.  Some of the important codes include voluntary principle on security and human rights, the equator principle and publish what you pay policy among many other codes.

There are a number of civil regulation shortcomings and limitations including wage payment problems, working in poor conditions and lack of freedom of association.  High rates of tropical deforestation and green gas emission also form some of the limitation of civil regulations in both developed and developing countries.  There are also challenges related to human rights and environmental abuses thus need for more monitoring activities. Global firms should aim at behaving socially responsible especially towards the practices and principles of their employees, consumers, and investors.  This will promote civil regulation and market virtue of global firms.  The government laws and policies should also be considered towards the provision of civil regulations and other voluntary codes of global firms.

What I have learnt from this chapter is that labor standards and investing operations should be considered in government regulations to promote good labor practices.  Global firms should also aim at working together in order to achieve their CSR goals and objectives. Corporate responsibility should also include procedures that promote compliance standards and other public policies.  This will promote public welfare especially by making corporate practices more transparent and ethical.