Social oversight and regulation of entrepreneurial and commercial activities have always involved an unbalanced three-way competition for influence between the State, the business world (companies and their institutional representatives) and consumers. This struggle is growing more intense in a market society centred around organizations. External (i.e. State) regulation and market self-regulation (primarily by the business world) are usually studied separately in the social sciences, and this leads to a grossly oversimplified understanding of the social organization of business, and hence of market society as a whole (...).