Business and Human Rights Scholarship in Social Issues in Management: An Analytical Review

Abstract

Business and human rights (BHR) scholarship addresses whether corporations have human rights responsibilities and if so, what such responsibilities mean for corporate behaviour. BHR scholarship is cross-disciplinary and scattered across numerous academic disciplines such as law, philosophy, management, political science and accounting. While BHR scholarship in law is well established, this review focuses on BHR scholarship in the social issues in management (SIM) field, which – like BHR scholarship – addresses the nature and content of corporate responsibility. Based on a review of 180 articles from SIM speciality journals published between 1990 and 2017, the article suggests that BHR research has emerged as a subfield of study within SIM. BHR scholarship to date has largely focused on the justification for why firms have human rights responsibilities, and on descriptive research studies at the organizational and macro level. The article develops a conceptual framework for future BHR research which can usefully guide scholars – both SIM and non-SIM BHR scholars – in identifying potential research gaps and embedding their research in related focus areas.

Human Rights: A Promising Perspective for Business & Society

“…In parallel to the developments in international policy, national regulation, and business practice, scholarship on BHR, which has been evolving since the 1980s, accelerated after the publication of the UNGP’s (Schrempf-Stirling & Van Buren III, 2020). BHR scholarship “addresses whether corporations have human rights responsibilities and if so, what such responsibilities mean for corporate behavior” (Schrempf-Stirling & Van Buren III, 2020, p. 28). Furthermore, it engages with various legal and nonlegal mechanisms to hold business accountable for such responsibilities (Wettstein, 2022).…”

“…Capturing and making sense of such developments has always been at the core of the scholarly agenda of the business and society field as well (Bueno & Bright, 2020; Wood & Logsdon, 2019). Given that business and society is essentially about explicating “the origin, nature, and content of corporate responsibilities” (Schrempf-Stirling & Van Buren III, 2020, p. 30; see also Epstein, 2019; Wood & Logsdon, 2019), it is thus surprising that the BHR perspective has not yet systematically entered business and society scholarship. There have been a variety of articles published in the past few years that have sought to analyze the relationship between BHR and CSR (see, for example, Obara & Peattie, 2018; Ramasastry, 2015; Wettstein, 2012).…”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Stakeholders

“…Rowley & Berman, 2000). Systemic problems often come with their own measurable impacts: public health improvement (Crane et al, 2018), respect for (versus violations of) human rights (Schrempf-Stirling & Van Buren, 2020), progress toward sustainable development goals (Howard-Grenville et al, 2019), and so on. The stakeholder theorist thus becomes a contributing voice to domain-specific conversations on system-level problems, offering alternative explanations for these outcomes rooted in how firms interact, collaborate, and do business with their stakeholders.…”

Young’s Social Connection Model and Corporate Responsibility

“…At the same time, when we look deeper into the evolution of BHR we find scholars moving away from LMR towards more SCMR. This is most prominent in the BHR scholarship that focuses on the normative argumentation of why business have human rights obligations (Schrempf-Stirling and van Buren 2020). Scholars apply Kantian ethics (Luke 1998;Hahn 2009), Confucian ethics (Kim 2014) or social contract theory (Cragg 2000;Bishop 2008).…”