Managing Human Rights Obligations of Businesses and Measuring Outcomes: What Now?

Abstract

Business responsibility for human rights is emerging as an essential framework for clarifying the broader social obligations of businesses and the managers who run them. This symposium, which directly relates to the conference theme of “Improving Lives,” will explore the theoretical and practical challenges this new agenda poses for measuring human rights performance and incorporating associated processes into management systems. The symposium will advance the innovation of new theoretical and empirical insights into the management of human rights. To this end, it will highlight the opportunities that could result from mastering the measurement challenge for human rights: If consumers and investors had data readily available that assessed a company’s human rights performance, they could reward “good” companies (and punish “bad companies) and in so doing become drivers for a corporate human rights agenda. At this point, available data does not measure human rights performance but merely a company’s human rights commitment and its processes. If human rights management is genuinely improving lives, there needs to be empirical evidence showing this to be so. If empirical evidence shows that human rights management is not genuinely improving lives, this information is essential for changing BHR-related policies and practices. This symposium thus seeks to highlight innovative scholarship in the area of human rights measurement and also to surface opportunities for future research in this important domain. Business and Human Rights Measurement: The Next Frontier Presenter: Judith Schrempf-Stirling; GSEM - U. of Geneva Measuring Human Rights Performance for Investors Presenter: Casey O'Connor; NYU Stern Accounting for Human Rights: The Challenge of Meaningful Measurement Presenter: Kenneth McPhail; U. of Manchester Human Rights and Consumer Decisions Presenter: Guido Palazzo; U. of Lausanne