Corporate Social Responsibility?

Human Rights in the New Global Economy

Charlotte Walker-Said,John D. Kelly

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226244440
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

With this book, Charlotte Walker-Said and John D. Kelly have assembled an essential toolkit to better understand how the notoriously ambiguous concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions in practice within different disciplines and settings. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from leading figures in human rights programs around the United States, they vigorously engage some of the major political questions of our age: what is CSR, and how might it render positive political change in the real world?The book examines the diverse approaches to CSR, with a particular focus on how those approaches are siloed within discrete disciplines such as business, law, the social sciences, and human rights. Bridging these disciplines and addressing and critiquing all the conceptual domains of CSR, the book also explores how CSR silos develop as a function of the competition between different interests. Ultimately, the contributors show that CSR actions across all arenas of power are interdependent, continually in dialogue, and mutually constituted. Organizing a diverse range of viewpoints, this book offers a much-needed synthesis of a crucial element of today's globalized world and asks how businesses can, through their actions, make it better for everyone.

Chapter One

Introduction

Power, Profit, and Social Trust

Charlotte Walker-Said

Translating Human Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility: Shifting Terrains

In the new world order that emerged in the wake of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt argued that the nation-state had become the necessary guarantor of human rights and their greatest potential threat. Now, in our global economy infused with new modes of governance, ascendant market forces, and competing value hierarchies, the same paradox has another institutional home: the corporation. Is the corporation a crucible or an obstacle for the global human rights order? A benefactor or nemesis? The time has come for serious inquiry into the understudied but critical relationship between corporations and human rights and the trend toward codes and practices of corporate social responsibility.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a burgeoning arena of corporate activity and academic research and reflects the growing integration of business and market-oriented strategies in the day-to-day activities of government, civil society, development practice, and humanitarian intervention. Among its many aims and positions, it claims to quantify and qualify the “social impact” as well as the environmental and social corollaries of business in a particular space. CSR is both a conceptual framework of operation, strategy, and human relations and a corporate culture movement with a focus on ethical standards. These standards are a broad and largely self-defined set of devotions, with some corporations emphasizing environmental stewardship, some underscoring their humane labor conditions, and others highlighting their business’s contributions to achieving human flourishing in poor or marginalized communities. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development qualifies CSR as “the continuing commitment by business to contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the community and society at large.”1 Many scholars simply consider CSR a framework for conceptualizing the business and society interface.2 Its critics argue that CSR constitutes a legitimizing discursive domain that implies an inclination toward ethics and humane standards, but in reality safeguards capitalist imperatives against critique and regulation.3 What is incontrovertible is that corporate social responsibility has become a prevailing mandate for multinational corporations and is transforming the role of business in global politics and social relations. It is also conceptually altering human rights law, policy, and theory.

Human rights scholars, to date, have attended more to nation-states and international law, and to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their redressive intervention systems. But corporations have greater weight, not only in economies but also in society and governance globally. Here we are interested in theories but first of all in reality, and we study actual interventions. This volume has invited experienced ethnographers, political scientists, legal scholars, historians, and other expert social scientists to inform current deliberations on two key questions: can codes and practices of corporate social responsibility solve fundamental human rights problems? And what happens when CSR becomes a new vehicle of the progressive politics that characterize the human rights movement?

Serious evaluation of corporate social responsibility is timely for several reasons. First, recent decisions in the realm of “hard law” have questioned the use of national and international laws to prosecute human rights violations by corporations.4 This has had the effect of transforming corporate respect for human rights from a government-enforced public commitment to one of private choice. Second, human rights have assumed a central position in the discourse surrounding international development, and rights institutions have embraced a progrowth stance in regard to national and global economies.5 As capitalist expansion becomes increasingly embedded in global human rights movements, corporations have gained considerable authority as economic as well as humanitarian leaders. In light of these cultural shifts, international human rights institutions are transitioning away from antiglobalization, anticorporate discourses toward global initiatives to increase, rather than decrease, the role of corporations in developing economies and markets so that they might foster more positive outcomes for the world’s societies.

International human rights activism has also undergone a significant philosophical transition that privileges economic concerns and the human condition of poverty rather than social and political rights. This marks a shift from post-World-War-II-era human rights milestones, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emphasized the fulfillment of fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, as well as civil rights such as nondiscrimination, political equality, and self-determination. International preoccupation with suffering as a result of material want has spawned two dimensions of the current human rights agenda that this volume will examine in depth: the use of human rights to interpret, intervene in, and manage the specific human rights catastrophe of poverty, and the promotion of the Right to Development, passed as a United Nations charter in 1986, which takes as given that to accomplish the provision of freedoms and opportunities for individuals, there must be a universal escalation of entitlements that are borne through increases in wealth.6

Critics of human rights in their late twentieth-century expression have cited the turn toward humanitarian crisis and underdevelopment as an apolitical or antipolitical gesture. Rather than institution building and coordinated government action on matters of paramount human importance, such as erecting safeguards to secure peace and guarantee justice, humanitarian praxis mobilizes response to catastrophes and does little to transform the causes of emergency.7 Corporate social responsibility can be interpreted either as another iteration of the minimalist, “rescue” approach of humanitarian outreach or a novel undertaking that seeks to redirect human rights considerations toward a framework that allows individuals to achieve their social and political capabilities through just economic practices and is thus rights affirming from the outset.

In November 1999, John Ruggie, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, and Georg Kell, executive director of the United Nations Global Compact, publicly admitted the failure of postwar global economic institutions to advance human rights and promote universal well-being. Drawing from examples of extreme poverty and the state of human vulnerability worldwide, Ruggie and Kell argued that the financial gains attained from connecting networks of production and finance in the late twentieth century were unevenly distributed, which isolated economic growth from human development and the achievement of human rights. Ruggie and Kell then called on the world’s corporations and financial institutions to commit themselves to adopting governance principles derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to embed the economic sphere in broader frameworks of shared values and ensure the positive human corollaries of the expansion of wealth.8 The tangible outcome of this declaration was the creation of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate citizenship initiative launched in 2000, in which corporations voluntarily commit to align their operations with human rights principles.9 Ruggie has recently attested that the Global Compact is intended to remedy a state-based system of global governance and demonstrate that international protocols can guide and promote business as well as human rights.10

The impact of this endeavor and others like it, and their future as models for what Anne-Marie Slaughter terms the “new world order,” in which suprastate, substate, and nonstate actors balance multiple allegiances and have global reach, is explored in this volume. As critical partners in the new world order, corporations have considerable incentive to contribute to effective governance, since—in the words of Kofi Annan—“unless the global market is held together by shared values, it will risk serious global instability, conflict, and insurmountable risk to both business and economic security on a macro level.”11 Ruggie has echoed Annan’s warning to corporate entities to consider human rights in the name of self-preservation, urging corporations to reform business practice so they can “survive and thrive.”12

Ruggie, Kell, and Annan’s arguments for a new institutional equilibrium managed by agents of capital communicate a faith in corporations and markets to align their goals with humanitarian priorities. Other UN representatives have stated that they believe there is an emerging “global consensus” regarding what concerted efforts are required to reform corporate policies and link business and human rights concerns.13 However, despite enthusiasm across governance sectors, what this volume will demonstrate is that no such collective unanimity exists on what CSR ultimately endorses and promotes, even within distinct fields of action.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proposes that business reform should take the form of promoting business concern for the welfare of society, which can be realized in part by freeing business-sector capacity and further opening markets, which can “empower poor people.”14 Alternative CSR approaches seek to establish guidelines of conduct rather than modes of market expansion in distressed regions.15 These and other parallel initiatives illustrate the rise of competitive and converging transnational campaigns to advise the private choice to protect human rights, which are critical in an era of nonexistent regulatory mechanisms.

In the legal discipline, human rights lawyers and policy advocates have demonstrated a greater desire to move current international CSR initiatives toward establishing enforceable international law, as well as human rights treaties regulating corporate activity in developing countries, particularly in those countries whose commitment to human rights in national law and governance practice is feeble or nonexistent. However, as this volume demonstrates, this dimension of CSR is in fundamental tension with other current ideologies. The CSR movement that promotes corporations as partners in humanitarian outreach and economic growth resists to some degree demands for greater accountability for corporations who abuse human rights.16 As a corollary of the growing consensus to develop business sectors, invest in market systems, channel finance to underdeveloped countries, and deliver development impacts, arguments for a regulatory model of CSR have been marginalized from many institutional discussions. Even the United Nations declared it is unambiguously against establishing a form of CSR that would create a transnational judicial system of redress for human rights violations committed by corporations.17 The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and John Ruggie’s “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” framework attest to the successful pairing of corporate and human interests and stop well short of imposing a regulatory framework that could address corporate malfeasance.18 Nevertheless, many legal practitioners are often skeptical of relying on “soft law” and ethical voluntarism to protect human rights and are critical of the benevolence expected of corporate agents.

In addition to competitive fields of action with disparate visions for CSR, there are also contentious philosophical dimensions: how and why is business practice politicized and socially inscribed, and why are institutions that govern private activity called to have a function for the public good?19 Despite continued efforts and grand claims by major human rights actors like the United Nations, current iterations of CSR lack a truly universal set of normative ethics and practices. Thus the theme of “responsibility” in this volume is conceptualized along various political-economic and sociocultural lines. In this way, this work mirrors CSR themes in practice throughout the world, which claim participation in a global movement, but in fact are highly distinctive, autonomous, and require contextualization.

Corporate Social Responsibility Proponents and Critics

Growing approval of the role of corporations in development as well as social and political life has numerous critics. Many critique sanguine conceptualizations of the current global economic system and distrust its corporate leaders.20 Some argue that CSR is a “hegemonic accommodation” that reflects the dominant cultural, economic, and political role of business in society, and the permeation of the discourse of competitiveness and free markets into state and social structures.21 They are joined by other critics of the neoliberal economic model who make broad claims that corporations, as the engines of liberal market expansion, deregulation, and declining state authority, cannot be rightly harnessed and have no real capacity to transform conditions of poverty, inequality, and injustice.22 The world of human rights blogs, mass media, and activism largely echoes and intensifies scholarly criticism of corporate engagement with human rights and development.23

As allies of this critique, an active community of human rights litigators, legislators, and legal advocates is seeking mechanisms for corporate accountability rather than expressing enthusiasm for corporate collaboration. The legal history of Alien Tort Statute (ATS) jurisprudence in the United States points to renewed atte...