When I first entered the academy, I realized (thanks to my wonderful LL.M. adviser, Karen Engle) that where I could be most useful is in researching the intersection between corporations and human rights. Prof. Engle pointed out that my corporate and financial background as a former S.E.C. attorney gave me some knowledge on corporations and corporate governance that many human rights attorneys or academics might not have. Jumping on this, I began to develop my scholarship in this area.
Over five years later, I still find that what I do and what I write about is hard for many people to classify. There are scholars with corporate backgrounds similar to mine who write on issues that impact the larger stakeholder community rather than issues that simply affect corporations and their shareholders. They write on issues such as environmental impact, human rights or labor issues, and their scholarship is typically categorized as corporate social responsibility work. While I have nothing but respect for the people who work and write in this area, it is not at all what I do. I write about business and human rights – particularly Transnational Corporations and their responsibility for human rights. most often, I think about corporate accountability structures for human rights violations. Nonetheless, when discussing my work with other academics, I am often mislabeled as aCSR expert.
Intuitively, I knew there was a distinction between what I was doing and the great work of the people engaged in CSR research, but until last year, I could not articulate that distinction. Then last July, in connection with a piece I was writing on the U.N.’s history with business and human rights, I came across a definition that succinctly articulates the difference.
According to Chris Avery the founder and director of he Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and an international lawyer, “A CSR approach tends to be top-down: a company decides what issues it wishes to address. Perhaps contributing to community education, healthcare or the arts or donating to disaster relief abroad or taking steps to encourage staff diversity or reduce pollution. These voluntary initiatives should be welcomed. But a human rights approach is different. It is not top-down, but bottom-up – with the individual at the centre, not the corporation. When it comes to human rights, companies do not get to pick and choose from a smorgasbord those issues with which they feel comfortable.”
Over the years, it seems there has been a growing awareness that traditional notions of CSR might not fit within a framework for business and human rights. Often scholars would simply expand the definition of CSR to include business and human rights issues. In 2008, Lisa LaPlante and Suzanne Spears discussed the issue of community consent when companies extract resources from mines. For them, however, this issue is a CSR issue rather than a business and human rights issue. As they define it “Corporate Social Responsibility addresses the relationship between corporations and the societies with which they interact. It includes the responsibilities inherent on both sides of these relationship and calls for corporations to respond, not only to shareholders, but also to other stakeholders interested in their operations.”
So, is it just a simple question of changing terms or is something else going on here? I think an argument can be advanced for both sides. On the one hand, people who would advocate for compounding CSR and business and human rights issues into one definition can say that this might streamline corporations’ notions of those issues and eliminate wiggle room within a corporation’s expectations of compliance. So for instance, under a streamlined definition, a CSR department could also be tasked with risk assessments of operations abroad and their impact on a community’s human rights. On the other hand, this can work as a double-edged sword. For instance, in complying with risk assessments that should include a business’s impact on human rights frameworks, a corporate executive could point to traditional CSR actions such as donating money to charities and say that the corporation has done enough. But, as Chris Avery noted, a corporation being socially responsible by donating money to charity is not the same as a corporation complying with issues of human rights.
The current state of international law is predicated on the narrative that States (not corporations) are the duty bearers for a person’s human rights. However, everyone acknowledges that globalization has created a significant gap between the influence corporations have and the things we can hold them accountable for as a result of that influence. I am hopeful that, one day, that gap will narrow and we will finally have a legal framework for assessing corporation’s impact on human rights issues. However, until then, we are left with the paradox of a socially responsible corporation who may also be negatively influencing human rights issues. That reason alone if nothing else argues in favor of a distinction between CSR and a business and human rights as separate disciplines.
Photo Attribution: Getty Images. Originally found athttp://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/04/30/corporate-social-responsibility-good-for-business-good-for/
