Photograph: Paul Fiedler via Unsplash.
At the time of publishing this post, it has been a year and a half since I defended my PhD thesis (Jönsson 2024a). The thesis traces how the social and environmental responsibility of large corporations has been changing over the years. At the European level, one example of such a change is the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). It establishes a duty for corporations to identify and address “potential and actual adverse human rights and environmental impacts in the company’s own operations, their subsidiaries and, where related to their value chain(s), those of their business partners” (European Commission 2025a). The Directive is not necessarily hard on companies – but it is an example of a hardening of corporate social responsibility.
This hardening, then, was my area of interest. The thesis suggests that these changes should be understood as a temporary stabilization of the fundamental contradiction between profitability and sustainability, in times when corporations are responsibilized as neoliberal subjects. The key word here is temporary – something “not lasting or needed for very long”, with synonyms including “short-lived”, “provisional”, and “disposable” (Cambridge Dictionary 2025). The theoretical perspective taken here proposes that law and regulation respond to the contradictions and conflicts of our time. Rather than resolving them, however, regulation works primarily to stabilize them – but only temporarily.
Recent developments illustrate just how short-lived, provisional, disposable – indeed, temporary – these new changes are. In February 2025, the European Commission proposed regulatory simplification through Omnibus I and II; this included amendments of Directives such as the CSDDD. In June 2025, the European Council agreed to such simplification. For the CSDDD, this includes e.g. adjusting the scope of the Directive to focus on the “largest companies”; not including indirect business partners in due diligence requirements; requiring “general scoping” exercises instead of “comprehensive mapping” by companies; and postponing the Directive’s transposition to 2028 (European Council 2025). What the Commission is doing is “recalibrating some EU rules in a growth-friendly manner” (European Commission 2025b). The overarching aim is clear: to “boost our competitiveness and unleash growth”, which will benefit companies “across the EU” (ibid.).
The CSDDD entered into force in 2024. A year later, it is already being amended. From my theoretical perspective, this can be traced back to the fundamental contradiction between profitability and sustainability – indeed, the Commission cites a need to “get the balance right” (European Commission 2025b). But above all, it illustrates law and regulation as temporary stabilizations – and therefore, vulnerable in the face of powerful interests. Importantly, the Commission references the “difficulties” highlighted by companies as a reason for introducing the Omnibus package (ibid.; for an analysis of Swedish companies’ position on the CSDDD, see Jönsson 2024b).
In light of this years’ theme for the NSfK research seminar, 25 years into the millennium: New challenges for crime control and prevention, what does this development mean? What appears to be at stake is perhaps not so much a new challenge, but rather a well-known one: the challenge of curbing harmful corporate conduct and ensuring accountability. For us as criminologists, our challenge remains as well: to research crimes and harms by powerful actors, as well as the attempts at regulating their conduct. Let us hope for continued analyses of this in the 25 years to come.
References
Cambridge Dictionary (2025), Temporary.
European Commission (2025a), Corporate sustainability due diligence.
European Commission (2025b), Questions and answers on simplification omnibus I and II.
European Council (2025), Simplification: Council agrees position on sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements to boost EU competitiveness.
Jönsson (2024a), Hardened Responsibility?
Jönsson (2024b), Navigating Contradictory Demands.
About the Author
Elin Jönsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Sociology of Law Department, Lund University. She also works part-time at the Department of Criminology, Stockholm University.
University profile: https://www.soclaw.lu.se/en/elin-jonsson
