ABSTRACT:Increasingly, global businesses are confronted with the question of complicity in human rights violations committed by abusive host governments. This contribution specifically looks at silent complicity and the way it challenges conventional interpretations of corporate responsibility. Silent complicity implies that corporations have moral obligations that reach beyond the negative realm of doing no harm. Essentially, it implies that corporations have a moral responsibility to help protect human rights by putting pressure on perpetrating host governments involved in human rights abuses. This (...) is a controversial claim, which this contribution proposes to analyze with a view to understanding and determining the underlying conditions that need to be met in order for moral agents to be said to have such responsibilities in the category of the duty to protect human rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this article I inquire into Confucian ethics from a non-ideal stance investigating the complex interaction between Confucian ideals and the reality of the modern workplace. I contend that even Confucian workers who regularly engage in social rites at the workplace have an internal, Confucian reason to appreciate the value of rights at the workplace. I explain, from a Confucian non-ideal perspective, why I disagree with the presumptuous idea that labor (or workplace) rights are necessarily incompatible with Confucian ideals and (...) values. Specifically, I argue that if managers were “sages,” the highest moral exemplars and authorities in the Confucian tradition, they would perceive that social rituals alone are often not a contextually intelligent and valued response for the development of intimate communities in the modern workplace. The sage perspective will lead Confucian managers to realize, from their own moral perspective, that they have good reason to balance rites with rights, so long as the adoption is extrinsically valuable and consistent with the Confucian ideal. This article contributes to the debates about Confucianism's compatibility with rights, helps Western human rights scholars better contextualize their arguments in Confucianism-influenced cultures, and contributes to the development of a Confucian or Chinese approach to business ethics. (shrink)

During the last years, there has been an increasing discussion on the role of business in human rights violations and an increase in human rights litigation against companies. The result of human rights litigation has been rather disillusioning because no corporation has been found guilty and most cases have been dismissed. We argue that it may nevertheless be a useful instrument for the advancement of the business and human rights agenda. We examine the determinants of successful human rights litigation in (...) terms of judicial, educational, and regulatory effects. This article reviews more than 40 corporate foreign direct liability cases and their effects on corporate human rights policies and conduct. The review shows that most corporations adjusted their human rights policies and adopted additional measures to cope with human rights issues during or shortly after the legal proceedings. Opening legal channels for human rights litigation may be one way for governments to incentivize firms to respect human rights. These findings have implications for the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as well as on our interpretation of the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kiobel v. Shell. (shrink)

As recently stakeholders complain about the use of conflict minerals in consumer products that are often invisible to them in final products, firms across industries implement conflict mineral management practices. Conflict minerals are those, whose systemic exploitation and trade contribute to human right violations in the country of extraction and surrounding areas. Particularly, supply chain managers in the Western world are challenged taking reasonable steps to identify and prevent risks associated with these resources due to the globally dispersed nature of (...) supply chains and the opacity of the origin of commodities. Supply chain due diligence represents a holistic concept to proactively manage supply chains reducing the likelihood of the use of conflict minerals effectively. Based on an exploratory study with 27 semi-structured interviews within five European industries, we provide insights into patterns of implementation, key motivational factors, barriers and enablers, and impacts of SCDD in mineral supply chains. Our results contribute to both theory and practice as we provide first insights to SCDD practices and make recommendations for an industry-wide implementation of SCDD. Altogether, this study provides the basis for future theory testing research in the context of SCDD and conflict mineral management. (shrink)

Under conditions of growing interconnectedness of the global economy, more and more stakeholders are exposed to risks and costs resulting from business activities that are neither regulated nor compensated for by means of national governance. The changing distribution of risks poses a threat to the legitimacy of business firms that normally derive their legitimacy from operating in compliance with the legal rules of democratic nation states. However, during the process of globalization, the regulatory power of nation states has been weakened (...) and many production processes have been shifted to states with weak regulatory frameworks where businesses operate outside the reach of the democratic nation state. As a result, business firms have to address the various legitimacy challenges of their operations directly and cannot rely upon the legitimacy of their regulatory environment. These developments challenge the dominant approach to corporate governance that regards shareholders as the only stakeholder group in need of special protection due to risks not covered by contracts and legal regulations. On the basis of these considerations, we argue for a democratization of corporate governance structures in order to compensate for the governance deficits in their regulatory environment and to cope with the changing allocation of risks and costs. By way of democratic involvement of various stakeholders, business firms may be able to mitigate the redistribution of individual risk and address the resulting legitimacy deficits even when operating under conditions of regulatory gaps and governance failure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Little theoretical attention has been paid to the question of what obligations corporations and other business enterprises have to the four billion people living at the base of the global economic pyramid. This article makes several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, it is argued that corporations are properly understood as agents of global justice. Second, the legitimacy of global governance institutions and the legitimacy of corporations and other business enterprises are distinguished. Third, it is argued that a deliberative democracy (...) model of corporate legitimacy defended by theorists of political CSR is unsatisfactory. Fourth, it is argued that a Rawlsian theoretical framework fails to provide a satisfactory account of the obligations of corporations regarding global justice. Finally, an ethical conception of CSR grounded in an appropriately modest set of duties tied to corporate relationships is then defended. This position is cosmopolitan in scope and grounded in overlapping arguments for human rights. (shrink)

The social licence to operate concept is little developed in the academic literature so far. Deployment of the term was made by the United National Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework, which apply SLO as an argument for responsible business conduct, connecting to social expectations and bridging to public regulation. This UN guidance has had a significant bearing on how public regulators seek to influence business conduct beyond Human Rights to broader (...) Corporate Social Responsibility concerns. Drawing on examples of such public regulatory governance, this article explores and explains developments towards a juridification of CSR entailing efforts by public regulators to reach beyond jurisdictional and territorial limitations of conventional public law to address adverse effects of transnational economic activity. Through analysis of an expansion of law into the normative framing of what constitutes responsible business conduct, we demonstrate a process of juridification entailing a legal framing of social expectations of companies, a proliferation of law into the field of business ethics, and an increased regulation by law of social actors or processes. (shrink)

Following the situation of poverty in the rights paradigm, this paper explores the links between the rights-based and corporate social responsibility approaches to the realization of socioeconomic rights in the broader context of an emerging recognition of CSR as private regulation of business behaviour. It examines complex theoretical and practical dimensions of responsibility and potential contributions of businesses to poverty alleviation and clarifies the apparent paradox of legal compulsion of essentially voluntary CSR activities. Rather than treat rights and CSR as (...) parallel approaches to protecting socioeconomic rights, it is argued that CSR can be part of a coherent framework of laws and policies for legally translating broad human rights commitments to poverty reduction into concrete programmes. The paper demonstrates how legally propped CSR arrangements can support poverty reduction and appropriate task-specific contextualised definitions and boundaries of CSR that complement the rights-based approach. It is argued that human rights principles have normative dimensions to guide and help formulate policies, programmes and practices, which in turn allow for a creative use of and legal prop to CSR. The conceptualization of human rights is not restricted to one implementation method, and CSR can partly satisfy states’ human rights obligations and transcend the narrow conventional human rights discourse on obligations of non-state actors. (shrink)

The ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ (Principles) that provide guidance for the implementation of the United Nations’ ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ framework (Framework) will probably succeed in making human rights matters more customary in corporate management procedures. They are likely to contribute to higher levels of accountability and awareness within corporations in respect of the negative impact of business activities on human rights. However, we identify tensions between the idea that the respect of human rights is a perfect (...) moral duty for corporations and the Principle’s ‘human rights due diligence’ requirement. We argue that the effectiveness of the ‘human rights due diligence’ is in many respects dependent upon the moral commitment of corporations. The Principles leave room for an instrumental or strategic implementation of due diligence, which in some cases could result in a depreciation of the fundamental norms they seek to promote. We reveal some limits of pragmatic approaches to coping with business-related human rights abuses. As these limits become more apparent, not only does the case for further progress in international and extraterritorial human rights law become more compelling, but so too does the argument for a more forceful discussion on the moral foundations of human rights duties for corporations. (shrink)

Key accomplishments of political corporate social responsibility scholarship have been the identification of global governance gaps and a proposal how to tackle them. Political CSR scholarship assumes that the traditional roles of state and business have eroded, with states losing power and business gaining power in a globalized world. Consequently, the future of CSR lies in political CSR with new global governance forms which are organized by mainly non-state actors. The objective of the paper is to deepen our understanding of (...) political CSR and reintegrate notions of state power into political CSR scholarship by highlighting how states set the context within which business takes place, regulate offshore business practices, and play pivotal roles in new global governance mechanisms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We provide a brief history of the business and human rights discourse and scholarship, and an overview of the articles included in the special issue.

ABSTRACTMany academic authors, policy makers, NGOs, and corporations have focused on top-down human rights global norm-making, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. What is often missing are contextual and substantive analyses that interrogate rights mobilization and linkages between voluntary transnational rules and domestic governance. Deploying a socio-legal approach and using a combination of longitudinal field and archival data, this article investigates how a local, indigenous community in Northern Chile mobilized their rights over a period (...) of almost two decades. We found that rights mobilization was largely shaped by tensions between the different logics of legality and the business organization. In our case, the UNGP implementation process has been ineffective in giving rightsholders access to genuine remedy. On the contrary, it has led to weakened rights mobilization, dividing the local community. We conclude that greater attention to rights mobilization and domestic governance dynamics should be given in the business and human rights debate. (shrink)

To be and to remain ethical requires struggle from organizations. Struggling is necessary due to the pressures and temptations management and employees encounter in and around organizations. As the relevance of struggle for business ethics has not yet been analyzed systematically in the scientific literature, this paper develops a theory of struggle that elaborates on the meaning and dimensions of struggle in organizations, why and when it is needed, and what its antecedents and consequences are. An important conclusion is that (...) the greater the ethics gap and opposing forces, the greater the struggle required. Viewing business ethics as struggle has several implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

The “Protect, Respect, Remedy” Framework along with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is the current global standard regarding corporate conduct. This article analyses the UN Framework from the vantage point of labour rights in India by looking at the garment supply chain. It argues that it can do little to induce states and businesses to bring substantive improvements to working conditions in a largely informal economy like India. Without the state performing its duty to protect human (...) rights, the secondary responsibility of corporations can do very little in realising the rights of workers. Nonetheless, its tallest contribution is that it has given a platform for civil society to push for better conduct from all businesses and marks the beginning of a unified international business and human rights agenda. (shrink)

For years business ethics has limited the moral duties of enterprises to negative duties. Over the last decade it has been argued that positive duties also befall commercial agents, at least when confronted with large scale public problems and when governments fail. The argument that enterprises have positive duties is often grounded in the political nature of commercial life. It is argued that agents must sometimes take over governmental responsibilities. The German republican tradition argues along these lines as does Nien-Hé (...) Hsieh. Agents in commercial life are bound by positive duties because at some point they become citizens that must take on the responsibilities of the state. In this paper we leave undisputed the claim that corporations must acknowledge positive duties. However, we demonstrate that the political grounding fails, at least in the sense that this theory insufficiently acknowledges a long standing liberal tradition that vindicates apolitical markets and clear borderlines between politics and economics. We carve out an alternative route to the grounding of one specific positive duty—the duty to further justice. Our argument is based on the moral nature of commercial agents and tries to demonstrate that the duty to further justice ensues from liberalism. Taking a Kantian perspective, it conceptualizes the duty to further justice as a moral duty, orientated toward the political domain. It is grounded in the obligation to attain moral autonomy in the civil condition. (shrink)

How do firms make sense of creating shared value projects? In their sense-making processes, do they extend the meaning spectrum to include human rights? What are the dominant cognitive frames through which firms make sense of CSV projects, and are some frames more likely to have transformative power? We pose these questions in the context of small-scale firms in a low-to-middle income country—a context where CSV policies have been promoted extensively over the last decade in the expectation of improved economic (...) competitiveness, growth, and sustainable development processes. We employ a grounded theory approach to identify three dominant cognitive frames used by our respondents to make sense of CSV. The most prevalent frame prioritizes economic over social and environmental goals, and considers social, environmental, and human rights benefits to trickle down from economic growth and wealth generation. In the second frame, economic actors follow a win–win logic according to which environmental sustainability is pursued only if there are clear and foreseeable economic payoffs. The third frame is a niche that emphasizes the attainment of certain human rights goals, despite a perceived lack of immediate economic returns. Our work casts doubt on the capacity of CSV projects to stimulate sustainable development processes without radically changing entrepreneurs’ cognitive frames from growth first to humanizing the business. (shrink)

In the remediation of business-related human rights abuses, meaningful stakeholder engagement which culminates in effective access to remedy begins with forms of communication that enable the voice and agency of marginalized stakeholders, and value their lived experiences. Here, we consider how the development of a _dialogical_ theorization of stakeholder engagement is aligned with the practical and ethical goals of an effective access to human rights remedy. Drawing on dialogical theory, we discern four ethical criteria —_power cognizance, polyphonic pluralism, generative agonism (...) and discursive unfinalizability_— that reveal three general approaches to stakeholder engagement —_essentially monologic, seemingly dialogic and authentically dialogic_— based on the extent to which they exhibit the criteria above. We propose and discuss an 'authentically dialogic' approach for organizations adopting morally expansive, victim-centric approaches to engagement in the design and implementation of company-led remedial mechanisms. (shrink)

In the absence of effective judicial remediation mechanisms after business-related human rights violations, companies themselves are expected to establish remediation procedures for affected victims and communities. This is a challenge for both companies and victims since comprehensive company-based grievance mechanisms are currently missing. In this paper, we explore how companies can provide effective remediation after human rights violations. Accordingly, we critically assess two different approaches to conflict resolution, alternative dispute resolution and restorative justice, for their potential to provide dialogue-based, non-judicial (...) remediation. We argue that remedy through agreement-driven ADR mechanisms risks marginalizing the interests and concerns of victims and affected community members, particularly in weak institutional contexts. Hence, we develop a dialogue-driven framework for corporate remediation of human rights violations grounded on RJ principles. This restorative framework provides a comprehensive CGM that focuses on the harms and needs of victims and aims at restoring justice through restorative dialogue. Based on a prompt discovery and a thorough investigation of the grievance, companies should design and prepare the remediation process together with victims, offenders and affected community members. Through restorative dialogue with the affected parties about the circumstances and impacts of the wrongdoing, companies can repair the harm, regain legitimacy amongst stakeholders as well as transform their business practices to avoid future human rights violations. (shrink)