With Statoil as a Prism: Revisiting Key Features and Concerns in Western Oil Companies’ Evolving Human Rights Awareness, From the Mid-1990s to the 2000s

Abstract

This article uses Statoil (Equinor since 2018) as a prism to explore some key features and concerns of Western oil companies’ evolving human rights awareness from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. This period saw the first human rights lawsuits brought against oil companies and a gradual change in their human rights awareness. The article uses insights from the business history literature and new archival material from the oil industry to explain why business ethicists and legal scholars are wrong to argue that the relationship between business and social responsibility, on the one hand, and business and human rights, on the other, are inherently problematic and profoundly disparate due to their divergent historical origins. In so doing, the article offers a historical take on the so-called debate between business human rights (BHR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR), and it repudiates the argument that a so-called minimal understanding of human rights has hindered business from undertaking proactive human rights initiatives. Mapping onto both the business history literature and the BHR–CSR debate, the article aims for a richer understanding of the experiences and ideas that incentivized oil companies to “get serious” about human rights.