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I was delighted when my friend and colleague Jorge Esquirol asked me if I was interested in producing a work for an anticipated upcoming issue of Sciences Po Law Review (La Revue des Juristes), which he is directing, the theme of which is “Power, Purpose, and Profit: The Corporation in a Fracturing World Order.” The essays in the issue are meant to :
examine the shifting role of the corporation in light of the significant global upheavals underway. As founder power concentrates, states weaponize corporate law, and society increasingly questions the purpose of large corporations, the foundational architecture of corporate governance is coming undone. This issue assembles scholarship on how power, geopolitics, and corporate purpose are simultaneously reshaping the legal structures that govern who controls corporations, and to what ends. In light of your experience in the interplay between corporate governance, international developments and human rights.
To those ends I have prepared a discussion draft entitled "Power, Purpose, and Control—the Corporation as Platform, Router, and Control/Compliance Space in an Emerging World Order." This essay reconsiders the conventional narrative of a ‘fracturing world order’ by shifting the unit of analysis from the state to the enterprise. The notion of fracture, I argue, is bound up in the cognitive premises of its observer—a function of the observer’s commitment to the state as the foundational unit of ordering. Observed from the vantage point of the multinational enterprise, what appears as fracture is more accurately described as consolidation: the migration of ordering functions from state-based systems to enterprise-based systems organized around supply, production, and use chains, and mediated through compliance architectures and datafied governance. The corporation is reconceived as simultaneously a platform—a space within which ordering occurs; a router—directing flows of value, compliance expectations, data, and normative obligations across legal orders; and a control/compliance space—the site where governance is operationalized through internalized systems of accountability, risk, and compliance grammars. The emerging order fractures not only the state and its international system but also the individual, who is reconstituted as the sum of desires, behaviors, and data points within platform-enterprise spaces.
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I suggest that the corporation is indeed at the centre of a fracturing world order—but it is not being fractured. It is, rather, the site of re-ordering: the institutional form within which governance functions migrate as the state-based system loses its capacity to monopolize the production of normative order. The three functions developed in this essay—the corporation as platform, as router, and as compliance space—reveal that what appears as crisis from the state's perspective is transformation from the enterprise's. The platform function constitutes the space within which ordering occurs; the routing function directs the flows of normative obligation across polycentric governance landscapes; and the compliance function operationalizes governance through internalized systems of organizational cognition.
The challenge for legal scholarship—and for La Revue des Juristes as a forum for that scholarship—is to develop analytical frameworks adequate to this reality. Such frameworks must resist the temptation to take the state as the primary unit of ordering, must take seriously the normative capacity of enterprises as governance systems in their own right, and must grapple with the computational transformation that is reconfiguring the modalities of governance from sovereign command to algorithmic processing. They must also reckon with the implications of the emerging order for the individual—the reconstitution of the human subject as data point and factor of production within enterprise-governance architectures that were not designed with the dignity or autonomy of the person as their organizing principle.
This essay has offered one such framework—necessarily incomplete, necessarily provisional, necessarily open to the objection that it understates the resilience of the state, the agency of the individual, and the capacity of democratic institutions to reassert control over the ordering functions that enterprises have absorbed. These objections deserve engagement, and they will be engaged. But the starting point, I suggest, must be the recognition that the world order is not merely fracturing—it is reconstituting itself around institutional forms and governance modalities that the inherited categories of public international law, corporate law, and constitutional theory are ill-equipped to comprehend. The corporation—as platform, as router, as compliance space—is at the centre of this reconstitution. The task of legal scholarship is to see it clearly.
Comments and engagement always welcome. The current version of the discussion draft can be accessed via SSRN here: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7372058]; and follows below.
Power, Purpose, and Control—the Corporation as Platform, Router, and Control/Compliance Space in an Emerging World Order
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar
Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University
For Sciences Po Law Review (La Revue des Juristes)
Special Issue: “Power, Purpose, and Profit: The Corporation in a Fracturing World Order”
Discussion Draft 30 August 2026
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the conventional narrative of a ‘fracturing world order’ by shifting the unit of analysis from the state to the enterprise. The notion of fracture, I argue, is bound up in the cognitive premises of its observer—a function of the observer’s commitment to the state as the foundational unit of ordering. Observed from the vantage point of the multinational enterprise, what appears as fracture is more accurately described as consolidation: the migration of ordering functions from state-based systems to enterprise-based systems organized around supply, production, and use chains, and mediated through compliance architectures and datafied governance. The corporation is reconceived as simultaneously a platform—a space within which ordering occurs; a router—directing flows of value, compliance expectations, data, and normative obligations across legal orders; and a control/compliance space—the site where governance is operationalized through internalized systems of accountability, risk, and compliance grammars. The emerging order fractures not only the state and its international system but also the individual, who is reconstituted as the sum of desires, behaviors, and data points within platform-enterprise spaces.
Keywords: polycentric governance; platform theory; compliance as governance; autopoiesis; transnational legal orders; datafication
Introduction
The invitation to contribute to this special issue frames its inquiry around the corporation in a ‘fracturing world order.’[1] The framing is evocative, and deliberately so. It speaks to the dissolution of the post-Second World War liberal international order, the weaponization of economic interdependence, the rise of geopolitical rivalry as a structuring force in corporate regulation, and the growing assertion of founder and executive power against institutional constraints. The conventional narrative is well established and amply documented: the state-based international order is under stress, and with it the regulatory architectures—trade regimes, investment treaties, human rights frameworks—that have served as the normative infrastructure of globalization.[2] In this reading, corporations are simultaneously instruments of geopolitical competition and victims of regulatory fragmentation; they are caught between rival sovereignties, subjected to extraterritorial assertion, and pressed into service as vehicles for competing visions of social ordering.[3]
And yet, the premise of fracture is itself contestable—or, more precisely, it is bound up in the cognitive premises within which the observer operates.[4] The notion of fracture is a function of the object observed: the state, and the state’s system of ordering the world. If one shifts the gaze—if one takes as the primary unit of observation not the state but the enterprise—then what appears as fracture from the state’s vantage point is more accurately described as consolidation from the enterprise’s. The world order is indeed fracturing, but not with the consequences that the term, as conventionally deployed, suggests. Fracture does not lead to chaos—perhaps anarchy, in the technical sense of order without a centre—but certainly to ordering. The state may fracture, and the state-based order with it, but that does not mean that order itself fractures. Indeed, order is re-emerging in systems (not state-based ‘orders’), in supply, production, and use chains, and in the webs of markets-based, compliance-mediated, and increasingly virtual spaces from which an emerging order can be observed.[5]
This essay develops this thesis through a tripartite reconceptualization of the corporation. The enterprise is reconceived as three things simultaneously: first, a platform—a space within which ordering occurs among its participants; second, a router—directing flows of value, compliance expectations, data, and normative obligations across and between legal orders; and third, a control/compliance space—the site where governance is operationalized not through sovereign command but through internalized systems of accountability, risk, and compliance grammars. Taken together, these three functions suggest that the corporation is not merely an object of governance in a fracturing order but the emerging site of governance itself—the locus where ordering migrates as state-based systems lose their monopoly on normative production.
I. Fracture as a Semiotic Effect
The claim that the world order is fracturing is not merely one perspective among many. It is produced by a specific set of cognitive markers—semiotic premises that privilege the state as the foundational signifying object in the construction of order. Sovereignty, territory, jurisdiction, and the public/private distinction are not merely institutional facts within that account; they are the signs through which the account becomes intelligible.[6] Legality itself, as a semiotic system, operates from these markers: it identifies the state as the object of authority, translates that object into jurisdictional relations, and supplies the interpretive forms through which disruption can be recognized as fracture. Broekman’s account of cognition and conversion makes the point more precise: the object is not simply found; it is made available through naming, signification, and interpretation. Systems theory, particularly as developed by Luhmann and extended into the domain of societal constitutionalism by Teubner, supplies a useful pivot—not because it simply invites a change of vantage point, but because it discloses the multiplicity of operationally closed systems within which state-centered ordering is assembled.[7]
If one takes seriously the proposition that modern society is functionally differentiated—organized not around a single centre but around multiple, operationally closed, autopoietic systems (the legal, economic, political, scientific, and other systems)—then the notion of fracture assumes a different [8]significance: the state’s apparent centrality is itself a product of a particular coupling of systems and a particular semiotic allocation of the first—that is, of the object permitted to organize the rest. In the inherited architecture, the state was treated as the semiotic first: the object around which political, legal, and economic relations could be named and ordered. Sovereignty supplied the semiotic second, the signifying relation through which those relations were connected; legality supplied the semiotic third, the interpretive and meaning-making apparatus through which the arrangement could reproduce itself. The question, then—deliberately provocative—is whether so much contemporary scholarship directed at defending these cognitive markers is now reactionary and orthodox: whether preserving the state-centered semiotic architecture against disturbances to its coherence is analogous to insisting on a geocentric model after Copernicus. The question is not a declaration that the state has disappeared. It is whether fidelity to the inherited semiotic first has become a cognitive cage that prevents observation of the systems now producing order.
The blurring of the public/private distinction must be understood in the same way—not as a sociological anomaly to be corrected, but as a semiotic phenomenon. The cognitive categories through which ordering was understood are dissolving, and with them the possibility of fracture-as-such, because fracture presupposes the integrity of the thing fractured.[9] States increasingly act through corporate forms: managing portfolios of assets, optimizing performance, deploying branding strategies, and competing for capital and influence. Corporations, conversely, govern populations—employees, users, suppliers, and communities—through rules, compliance requirements, dispute processes, and dependencies that resemble jurisdiction. But the point is not simply that public and private institutions now look alike.[10] It is that the signs ‘public’ and ‘private’ no longer reliably identify separate objects of observation. Their iterative mimetic dialectics produce one another, and the inherited boundaries do not so much fail as lose their semiotic force.[11]
From this standpoint, the movement from the state to the enterprise as the unit of observation is not a mere change of vantage point. It is a change in the signifying system itself. The Rashomon analogy therefore misleads: this is not a single event viewed from several angles, but different semiotic systems producing different objects of observation. At the phenomenological level, the observer is not encountering a fixed event from a new angle; the conditions of what can be encountered as the event have changed. In the terms used here, drawing on Peirce’s triadic semiotics, the semiotic first is the object, the semiotic second is signification, and the semiotic third is interpretation and meaning-making.[12] To shift the first from the state to the enterprise is consequently to shift the second—the pathways through which authority, obligation, value, and risk are signified—and the third—the interpretive communities and governance practices through which those relations acquire meaning.[13] The enterprise is not simply a new vantage point on the same fractured world; it is a different site of objectification, signification, and interpretation. That is why the emerging order can appear fractured within the state-centered system and consolidated within enterprise spaces without either account being reducible to the other.[14]
The enterprise’s advantage lies in its capacity for structural coupling, but that capacity must now be understood as semiotic as well as institutional. The enterprise translates normative expectations across legal, economic, political, technological, and social systems; it converts differentiated governance grammars into operational decisions and then circulates those decisions through supply, production, and use chains. It operates, in this sense, as a translation machine across governance grammars—not because it escapes normativity, but because its existence is constituted by the repeated conversion of one system’s signals into another system’s obligations. This is governance as iterative mimetic dialectics: the enterprise receives, interprets, and re-expresses expectations that it never fully controls. Where the state requires territorial coherence and the fiction of comprehensive jurisdiction, the enterprise can work within and between multiple normative orders at once. Is that advantage sufficient to treat the enterprise as an ordering system rather than as an object of state ordering? The question remains open, particularly for those committed to the primacy of public law and the democratic accountability of governance institutions.[15] But the question can no longer be avoided by returning to the state as the only legitimate semiotic first. The empirical and institutional reality is that enterprises increasingly participate in the production of the objects, signs, and interpretations through which governance is made intelligible. The question is therefore not whether enterprises order, but how their semiotic work orders—and it is to this question that the tripartite framework of platform, router, and compliance space is addressed.
II. The Corporation as Platform
The concept of the platform has become, in recent years, the dominant metaphor for understanding digitally mediated economic organization—but its utility extends well beyond the digital context.[16] I have elsewhere suggested that the multinational enterprise has always functioned as a platform: a space within which ordering occurs among its participants—employees, suppliers, consumers, investors, regulators, and the communities that constitute its operational environment. The platform, in this extended sense, is not merely a technological architecture but a normative space: a site within which rules are produced, obligations are generated, disputes are resolved, and power is exercised. The enterprise-as-platform is the space within which multiple legal, normative, and compliance orders interact; it is not merely the object of regulation but the site of regulation's production.[17]
The platform character of the enterprise becomes more explicit—and more consequential—with digitalization. Bratton's account of 'the Stack' as a computational architecture that layers sovereignty, governance, and interface design is suggestive of the extent to which the enterprise's platform function now operates through digital infrastructure.[18] But it would be a mistake to reduce the platform to its digital expression. The multinational enterprise organized through supply chains, contractual networks, and joint ventures has long constituted a platform in the sense that it provides the space—the architecture of relationships, obligations, and expectations—within which multiple actors coordinate their behaviour according to normative logics that are not reducible to any single legal order.[19]
The significance of the platform concept lies in its reconfiguration of the relationship between the enterprise and law. In the conventional account, the enterprise is the object of legal regulation: it is incorporated under one legal order, regulated by multiple legal orders, and subject to the jurisdictional claims of each state within which it operates. The platform reconceptualization inverts this relationship—or, more precisely, it supplements it. The enterprise-as-platform is not only subject to legal orders; it constitutes its own normative space. Within this space, the enterprise develops rules of engagement (codes of conduct, supplier requirements, employee policies), mechanisms of enforcement (audit, certification, contractual termination), and systems of adjudication (grievance mechanisms, ombudsperson offices, internal review processes) that function as a form of private governance.[20]
The metaphor of the temple and Samson, which I develop in the Virtual Platforms essay, captures the ambiguity of this position.[21] The platform, like Samson standing between the pillars of the Philistine temple, is both the infrastructure upon which the normative order rests and the force capable of bringing that order down. The enterprise-as-platform sustains a complex ecology of normative interactions—between employees and employers, between suppliers and purchasers, between data subjects and data controllers—but it also possesses the capacity to restructure those interactions, to withdraw the platform, to reconfigure its terms. The platform is, in this sense, a form of sovereign space: not sovereign in the Westphalian sense, to be sure, but sovereign in the operational sense that it determines the conditions under which ordering occurs within its boundaries. Within this architecture, state fracture then signifies the movement of ordering from state platforms elsewhere, not nowhere. For those still clinging to ancient ideals of the state, this is a cause for lamentation and perhaps resistance; for others, it signifies new hardware for old architectures, the phenomenology of which now emerges, the character of which is discussed next .
III. The Corporation as Router
If the corporation-as-platform emphasizes the space within which ordering occurs, the corporation-as-router emphasizes the flows that the enterprise directs across and between normative orders. The multinational enterprise does not merely occupy a position within multiple legal jurisdictions; it actively routes normative expectations, compliance obligations, and value across borders and between legal orders, translating, transposing, and directing these flows in ways that shape the operative content of governance across polycentric landscapes.[22]
The routing function is most visible in the domain of supply-chain governance. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights established the expectation that business enterprises should 'know and show' that they respect human rights throughout their operations and supply chains.[23] The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) transforms this expectation into a legal obligation, requiring in-scope companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their chains of activity.[24] What both instruments contemplate—but neither fully theorizes—is the routing function: the enterprise's role in translating normative expectations generated in one legal order (the EU, for example) into operational requirements imposed upon actors situated in other legal orders (suppliers in the Global South, for example), mediated through contractual mechanisms, audit protocols, and certification standards that are themselves transnational in character.[25]
The router metaphor draws on the rhizomatic model of Deleuze and Guattari, in which flows of obligation and expectation do not follow a single hierarchical path but proliferate through multiple, non-linear connections.[26] The enterprise routes not only compliance obligations but also value, data, risk assessments, and normative expectations across its network of relationships. In doing so, it performs a function that was historically reserved for inter-state mechanisms: the coordination of normative expectations across jurisdictional boundaries. The critical difference is that the enterprise performs this function not through diplomatic negotiation or treaty-making but through contractual architecture, supply-chain management, and increasingly through algorithmic systems that enable continuous monitoring, compliance analytics, and real-time risk assessment.[27]
The routing function is amplified by digitalization and the deployment of artificial intelligence in supply-chain governance. Where the enterprise's routing capacity was historically constrained by the limitations of periodic audit and manual reporting, computational systems now enable what might be called continuous routing: the real-time translation of normative inputs (regulatory changes, stakeholder expectations, risk signals) into compliance outputs (contractual modifications, supplier requirements, risk assessments) distributed across the enterprise's operational network.[28] This transformation positions the enterprise as the critical node in the emerging normative order—not states, not international organizations, but the enterprise as the router through which governance expectations are translated into operational reality.[29]
One must be cautious, of course, about overstating the autonomy of the routing function. The enterprise routes normative expectations, but it does so within a field shaped by state regulation, market pressures, and the expectations of stakeholders whose power to disrupt the enterprise's operations constrains its discretion. The routing function is not sovereign in the strong sense; it is, rather, a form of iterative mimetic dialectics—a continuous process of translation and adaptation in which the enterprise mediates between the normative expectations of multiple systems without fully controlling any of them.
IV. The Corporation as Control/Compliance Space
The third dimension of the reconceptualization—the corporation as control/compliance space—addresses the mechanisms through which the enterprise operationalizes governance. I have elsewhere developed the argument that compliance is not merely a static regulatory obligation—a box to be checked, a rule to be followed—but an evolving architecture of organizational cognition: the institutional capacity to observe, interpret, and act upon overlapping normative environments.[30] Compliance, so understood, is governance: it is the mechanism through which the enterprise translates the normative expectations generated by multiple systems—legal, economic, social, political, technological—into institutional decisions and organizational behaviour.
The concept of governance grammars is central to this analysis.[31] Compliance, risk management, ESG frameworks, human rights due diligence protocols, and RegTech architectures are not discrete regulatory instruments but interconnected vocabularies—grammars—through which the enterprise observes, interprets, and acts upon its environment. These grammars operate simultaneously across several dimensions: the systems grammar, which structures the enterprise's capacity for self-observation; the governance grammar, which provides the normative vocabulary through which the enterprise translates external expectations into internal decisions; and the computational-quantum grammar, which enables the datafication of governance—the transformation of normative assessment from qualitative judgment to quantitative measurement, from periodic observation to continuous monitoring.
The enterprise as compliance space represents a fundamental shift in the locus and modality of governance. Governance is no longer primarily a function of state command—the promulgation of rules by a sovereign authority and their enforcement through coercive mechanisms.[32] It is, increasingly, a function of organizational cognition: the capacity of the enterprise to translate information from its environment into responsible decisions. The decisive marker of mature compliance, I have suggested, is precisely this institutional capacity for translation—the capacity to convert signals (regulatory changes, stakeholder expectations, risk data, market pressures) into organizational responses that are at once normatively responsive, operationally feasible, and institutionally sustainable.[33]
This transformation is profoundly augmented by artificial intelligence and computational systems. The deployment of algorithmic governance within the enterprise—automated compliance monitoring, predictive risk analytics, machine-learning-driven ESG assessment—transforms compliance from a periodic, retrospective exercise into a continuous, prospective operation.[34] The compliance space becomes, in effect, a computational space: a space within which governance is not merely operationalized but datafied, translated from the domain of human judgment into the domain of algorithmic processing. This is not, I hasten to add, a normatively neutral development. The computational transformation of compliance raises profound questions about accountability (who is responsible when an algorithm makes a governance decision?), transparency (can the reasoning of an algorithmic compliance system be rendered legible to human oversight?), and the displacement of human judgment from the centre of governance.[35]
And yet the trajectory is clear. The enterprise as compliance space is becoming the primary site of governance in the emerging order—the site where normative expectations generated by multiple systems are received, processed, and operationalized. The state retains its capacity to promulgate rules, but the enterprise increasingly determines how those rules are translated into operational reality. The enterprise as compliance space is, in this sense, the point at which Schmitt's sovereign exception meets Foucault's disciplinary apparatus: the enterprise decides (in the sovereign sense) what compliance means within its operational space, and it enforces that meaning through mechanisms of surveillance, measurement, and accountability that bear a striking resemblance to the disciplinary techniques that Foucault described.[36]
V. The Disaggregation of the Individual
The emerging order fractures not only the state and its system of inter-state ordering but also the individual—the human subject who has served, since the Enlightenment, as the normative foundation of legal and political theory.[37] Within platform-enterprise spaces, the individual is simultaneously aggregated and disaggregated. Aggregated, the individual becomes a member of mass collectives—consumers, data subjects, workers, stakeholders, users—whose identity is defined not by the singularity of subjective experience but by the functional categories through which the enterprise's governance grammars process human activity. Disaggregated, the individual is decomposed into the sum of desires, behaviours, needs, and data points that constitute the raw material of algorithmic governance.[38]
This double movement—aggregation and disaggregation—has profound implications for the normative status of the individual within the emerging order. The person, as the bearer of rights and the subject of governance, gives way to the data point, as the unit of measurement and the object of governance.[39] The trajectory mirrors, in a different but related dimension, the trajectory of simulacra that Baudrillard described: the progressive detachment of the sign from its referent, the displacement of the real by its model.[40] In the enterprise-as-compliance-space, the individual is known not through encounter but through data—through the aggregation of behavioural signals, consumption patterns, risk profiles, and compliance metrics that constitute the individual as a governable object within the enterprise's normative architecture.
This trajectory—from person to system to data point—mirrors, as I have suggested in the context of trust platforms, the migration of trust from faith in persons to faith in systems of accountability, and from qualitative judgment to quantitative measure.[41] The individual in the emerging order is reconstituted as a factor of production and an object of governance rather than its subject. One might object that this account is excessively pessimistic—that the individual retains agency, voice, and the capacity for resistance within and against platform-enterprise governance. The objection is not without force; and yet the institutional trajectory, augmented by the computational transformation of governance, presses inexorably toward the displacement of the human from the centre of the governance systems that determine the conditions of human flourishing.[42]
Conclusion
The corporation is indeed at the centre of a fracturing world order—but it is not being fractured. It is, rather, the site of re-ordering: the institutional form within which governance functions migrate as the state-based system loses its capacity to monopolize the production of normative order. The three functions developed in this essay—the corporation as platform, as router, and as compliance space—reveal that what appears as crisis from the state's perspective is transformation from the enterprise's. The platform function constitutes the space within which ordering occurs; the routing function directs the flows of normative obligation across polycentric governance landscapes; and the compliance function operationalizes governance through internalized systems of organizational cognition.[43]
The challenge for legal scholarship—and for La Revue des Juristes as a forum for that scholarship—is to develop analytical frameworks adequate to this reality. Such frameworks must resist the temptation to take the state as the primary unit of ordering, must take seriously the normative capacity of enterprises as governance systems in their own right, and must grapple with the computational transformation that is reconfiguring the modalities of governance from sovereign command to algorithmic processing. They must also reckon with the implications of the emerging order for the individual—the reconstitution of the human subject as data point and factor of production within enterprise-governance architectures that were not designed with the dignity or autonomy of the person as their organizing principle.[44]
This essay has offered one such framework—necessarily incomplete, necessarily provisional, necessarily open to the objection that it understates the resilience of the state, the agency of the individual, and the capacity of democratic institutions to reassert control over the ordering functions that enterprises have absorbed. These objections deserve engagement, and they will be engaged. But the starting point, I suggest, must be the recognition that the world order is not merely fracturing—it is reconstituting itself around institutional forms and governance modalities that the inherited categories of public international law, corporate law, and constitutional theory are ill-equipped to comprehend. The corporation—as platform, as router, as compliance space—is at the centre of this reconstitution. The task of legal scholarship is to see it clearly.
[1]The invitation to contribute to this special issue of La Revue des Juristes framed the inquiry around ‘the corporation in a fracturing world order.’ I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to develop these reflections, which draw on and extend arguments developed over the past two decades.
[2]See generally Larry Catá Backer, ‘The Structural Characteristics of Global Law for the 21st Century: Fracture, Fluidity, Permeability, and Polycentricity’ (2012) 17 Tilburg Law Review 177.
[3]See eg John Gerard Ruggie, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (WW Norton 2013); Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press 2019).
[4]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Fractured Territories and Abstracted Terrains: Human Rights Governance Regimes Within and Beyond the State’ (2016) 23 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 61.
[5]Larry Catá Backer, ‘The Emerging Normative Structures of Transnational Law: Non-State Enterprises in Polycentric Asymmetric Global Orders’ (2016) 31(1) Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law 1.
[6]See generally Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Klaus A Ziegert tr, Oxford University Press 2004) 76–82; Jan M Broekman, Meaning, Narrativity, and the Real (Springer 2016) 228–250; Jan M Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Springer 2023).
[7]Gunther Teubner, Constitutional Fragments: Societal Constitutionalism and Globalization (Oxford University Press 2012) 1–18.
[8]ibid 51–78. See also Gunther Teubner, ‘Societal Constitutionalism: Alternatives to State-Centred Constitutional Theory?’ in Christian Joerges, Inger-Johanne Sand and Gunther Teubner (eds), Transnational Governance and Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing 2004) 3.
[9]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Overcoming the Human, Rights, and the State in Human Rights’ in Joel Slawotsky (ed), A Research Agenda for Global Power Shifts and International Economic Law (Edward Elgar, forthcoming); see also Larry Catá Backer and Jan M Broekman, ‘The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, the “Human” Condition, and its Social Constitution—An Encounter’ (2024) 37(3) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 969; Larry Catá Backer, ‘Describe, Predict, Intervene!—On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era’ in Frank Fleerackers (ed), Rearguards of Subjectivity (Springer 2023) 21, 28–40.
[10]Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982) 8(4) Critical Inquiry 777, 789–795.
[11]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Multinational Corporations as Objects and Sources of Transnational Regulation’ (2008) 14(2) ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law 499, 501–510.
[12]Larry Catá Backer, ‘The Problem of the Enterprise and the Enterprise of Law: Multinational Enterprises as Polycentric Transnational Regulatory Spaces’ in Peer Zumbansen (ed), Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law (Oxford University Press 2021) 777, 780–790; see also Charles S Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’ in Justus Buchler (ed), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover 1955) 98–119.
[13]Luhmann (n 5) 106–115. One might usefully distinguish between structural coupling as Luhmann conceived it—the mechanism through which autopoietic systems maintain their operational closure while remaining cognitively open to their environment—and the more loosely used metaphor of ‘coupling’ in governance studies.
[14]Elinor Ostrom, ‘Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems’ (2010) 100(2) American Economic Review 641.
[15]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Governance Polycentrism or Regulated Self-Regulation—Rule Systems for Human Rights Impacts of Economic Activity Where National, Private and International Regimes Collide’ in K Blome and others (eds), Contested Collisions: Interdisciplinary Inquiries into Norm Fragmentation in World Society (Cambridge University Press 2016) 198; see also Luhmann (n 5) 106–115 and Backer, ‘The Problem of the Enterprise and the Enterprise of Law’ (n 11) 780–790.
[16]Larry Catá Backer, ‘The Virtual Platform Within the Temples of Law: Law and Platform as Each Other’s Subject and Object’ (forthcoming 2026).
[17]ibid. The metaphor draws on Judges 16:23–30, in which Samson, standing between the pillars of the Philistine temple, pulls down the structure upon its occupants. The platform, I suggest, occupies a similarly ambiguous position: it is both the infrastructure upon which the normative order rests and the force capable of bringing that order down.
[18]Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack (MIT Press 2016) 3–22.
[19]Fabio Bassan, Digital Platforms and Global Law (Edward Elgar 2021) 14–35.
[20]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Trust Platforms: The Digitalization of Corporate Governance and the Transformation of Trust in Polycentric Space’ (2024) 19 Regulation & Governance 806, 810–815.
[21]Backer, ‘Virtual Platform’ (n 16). The platform is thus not merely the object of law—to be regulated, licensed, supervised—but also the space within which law-like ordering is produced, contested, and enforced.
[22]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Are Supply Chains Transnational Legal Orders? What We Can Learn From the Rana Plaza Factory Building Collapse’ (2016) 1(1) UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law 11.
[23]United Nations, Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework (2011) UN Doc HR/PUB/11/04, Principles 15–21.
[24]Directive (EU) 2024/1760 of the European Parliament and of the Council on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence [2024] OJ L 2024/1760.
[25]Larry Catá Backer, ‘A Lex Mercatoria for Corporate Social Responsibility Codes without the State? A Critique of Legalization Within the State Under the Premises of Globalization’ (2017) 24(1) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 115, 130–145.
[26]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi tr, University of Minnesota Press 1987) 3–25. The rhizomatic model is useful here: flows of normative obligation do not follow a single hierarchical path but proliferate through multiple, non-linear connections.
[27]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Regulating Multinational Corporations: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities’ (2015) 22(1) Brown Journal of World Affairs 153, 160–168.
[28]Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press 2005) 63–86.
[29]Larry Catá Backer, ‘The Algorithmic Law of Business and Human Rights: Constructing Private Transnational Law of Ratings, Social Credit and Accountability Measures’ (2022) 18(4) International Journal of Law in Context 1.
[30]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Compliance as Governance: Organizational Cognition, Risk, and the Transformation of Institutional Decision-Making’ (forthcoming 2026) Revista Doctrina Distrital.
[31]ibid. The three grammars—systems grammar, governance grammar, and computational-quantum grammar—are not sequential stages but co-present dimensions through which the enterprise processes its normative environment.
[32]Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan tr, Vintage Books 1995; first published 1975) 195–228.
[33]Larry Catá Backer and Claire Methven O’Brien (eds), The Current State and Future Trajectories of Human Rights Due Diligence Laws: New Legal Norms on Human Rights Due Diligence (Routledge 2024).
[34]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Next Generation Law: Data-Driven Governance and Accountability-Based Regulatory Systems in the West, and Social Credit Regimes in China’ (2018) 28(1) Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 123, 140–158.
[35]Backer, ‘Trust Platforms’ (n 20) 818–825.
[36]Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (George Schwab tr, University of Chicago Press 2005; first published 1922) 5–15. The sovereign exception—the capacity to decide on the state of exception—migrates, I suggest, from the state to the enterprise, which increasingly determines the operative boundaries of its own normative space.
[37]Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Kevin Attell tr, University of Chicago Press 2005) 1–31.
[38]Larry Catá Backer and Jan M Broekman, ‘The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, the “Human” Condition, and its Social Constitution—An Encounter’ (2024) 37(3) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 969.
[39]Larry Catá Backer, ‘Describe, Predict, Intervene!—On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era’ in Frank Fleerackers (ed), Rearguards of Subjectivity (Springer 2023) 21, 28–40.
[40]Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser tr, University of Michigan Press 1994; first published 1981) 1–42.
[41]Backer, ‘Trust Platforms’ (n 20) 825–830. Trust migrates from faith in persons to faith in systems of accountability, and from qualitative judgment to quantitative measure.
[42]Backer, ‘Overcoming the Human’ (n 9). The six categories of transformation there described—decentering the human, decentering rights, privatizing the public sphere, governmentalizing the private sphere, managing discretionary supervision, and substituting AI for human decision-making—converge in the enterprise as compliance space.
[43]Teubner (n 7) 100–130.
[44]Backer, ‘Structural Characteristics’ (n 2) 190–195.
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