Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is at the center of debates about law’s sources and the opposition between soft law and hard law, which this PhD work aims to overcome in order to analyse real CSR legal effects within labor relations. Often criticized for being only companies self-produced standards, with no real legal effect, for the sole purpose of preventing the legislator’s normative action, CSR is nevertheless encouraged at national and international levels because, at the globalization time, it overcomes the fundamental social standards dysfunctions and national rights territorial limits. However, CSR is not devoid of any legal effect. Indeed, companies that created their own private legal order by enacting various standards, sometimes ensure their own full compliance with it.Moreover, this PhD work demonstrates that CSR is no subsidiary way over fundamental social and national rights, but complementary. This complementarity shows in legal relevance and synergy between companies’ private legal orders and other legal orders. Thus, this receipt of CSR standards by national legal orders makes it possible for them to produce more legal effects, and in particular, to engage companies’ liability which don’t fulfil their commitments to workers. In addition, this synergy allows the legislator to better appropriate companies’ practices in order to regulate their implementation and encourage companies to develop a real CSR policy, to the point of proceeding to a real CSR hardening.