Discussion: View Thread

The discussion on business and human rights has slowly been expanding to different disciplines. It emerged in the mid-1990s as a debate which was heavily dominated by the legal disciplines. Slowly, also business ethicists and CSR scholars started to engage with this evolving debate. They tend to interpret human rights responsibilities more expansive than legal scholars, with some of them arguing for broad positive responsibilities beyond the negative responsibility to respect human rights. While business and human rights is well-established in these disciplines today, political scientists and international relations scholars have started to get involved in the debate as well most recently, putting special emphasis on the implications of business and human rights for the changing nature of global governance in general. Despite the growing interest the business and human rights debate has generated among legal scholars of various backgrounds, among scholars concerned with social and moral responsibilities of business, and among a growing number of scholars dealing with international relations and global governance, general management studies – that is, the discipline at the very heart of it all – has proven to be surprisingly resistant or immune to this new discourse. The proposed panel is a first attempt to bridge this opening divide between theory and practice and thus to bring management studies into the debate on business and human rights. As such, the contribution of the panel is threefold: First, we aim at bringing scholars from legal studies, CSR, and business ethics together to share their perspectives on business and human rights with management scholars. Second, we aim at starting the conversation within management studies by presenting some first perspectives on the issue from management scholars. Third, we hope to find common leverage points for future research and discuss the directions of business and human rights across the disciplines.