‘From naming and shaming to knowing and showing’: human rights and the power of corporate practice

Abstract

A recent phenomenon in corporate governance discourses is a strong recourse to human rights. Human rights awareness and corporate policies have become part of the credo of ‘good’ business. This is also taken up in international institutions, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which assign a distinct human rights responsibility to transnational enterprises. The article interprets this transformation through the lens of the ‘sociology of critique’. It argues that the concept of corporate responsibility for human rights represents a capacity of capitalism to absorb fundamental criticism and incorporate the very values that formed the ground for critique. The article proceeds in three steps: First, I present the corporate responsibility to respect human rights as a reaction to fundamental critique against global corporate giants that emerged as part of a broad ‘anti-globalisation’ movement in the 1990s. Second, I argue that today multinationals ‘know and show’ responsibility and make human rights a subject of management strategies and tools. Human rights are being incorporated and translated into corporate policy programmes. This allows companies to disarm most fundamental strands of criticism. Third, I draw conclusions from this perspective on the productive power of business practice and implications for critique.