Dr Constantijn van Aartsen

Dr. Constantijn van Aartsen is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Private Law Department. He works on behalf of the Elverding Chair on Sustainable Business, Culture and Corporate Regulation, with whom he recently published an interview and desk research analysis of the sustainability embedding practices of 35 Dutch listed companies (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3957250).

Constantijn is an interdisciplinary researcher with a focus on questions of corporate regulation, sustainability and political economy. His prior work (A journey into causes of corporate misbehavior) focused on the scientific foundation of corporate law, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility, and demonstrated that these disciplines are unable to achieve more than suboptimal results because of shortcomings in the structure of their scientific analysis.

Constantijn is currently also working on a second book, titled The scientific foundation and limits of economic theories of the firm, which explores how reliance on economic science in corporate regulation is contributing towards economic disembedding and unsustainability. It demonstrates how we can transcend the limits of capitalism and shift towards a political economy which makes it possible to balance economic and non-economic concerns.