Corporate Responsibility For Wealth Creation And Human Rights

Enderle illustrates the importance of corporate responsibility by integrating wealth creation and human rights. An invaluable reference for students, teachers and researchers in business and economic ethics, social sciences and human rights studies, as well as for leaders in business, civil society organizations and international institutions.

This volume of Critical Studies on Corporate Responsibility, Governance and Sustainability harnesses corporate responsibility and green management to integrate social and environmental concerns into productive business operations, paving the way for future successes in emerging economies.

Your business should respect human rights, but what are the human rights? According to the globally agreed minimum standard for responsible business conduct, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the UNGPs) from 2011, your business should - at minimum - manage risks of impacts on the human rights contained in the 'International Bill of Human Rights' (IBHR), confer UNGPs Foundational Principle 12. You business may have adverse impacts on all human rights. Human rights represent the key elements of social sustainability and define the S in ESG. Human rights outline all key areas of importance to human dignity. Human Rights Explained is a tool that provides a basic understanding of how businesses can impact human rights and how such impact can be managed. This handbook presents all 48 human rights contained in the IBHR and explains how each right is relevant in a business context. Becoming familiar with human rights in a business context is a necessary step for companies to ‘respect human rights’ as required by the UNGPs. If you and your employees gain a clear understanding of human rights, your company will be much better equipped to be able to avoid adverse impacts on human rights. Through concrete examples, Human Rights Explained illustrates how businesses may adversely impact human rights, while also demonstrating how your business can manage that impact and even contribute positively to the fulfilment of each human right.

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.

Dimensions of Goodness is based on the second conference of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, whose aim is to bridge the normative and descriptive dimensions of knowledge by bringing in as many disciplines as possible to address fundamental philosophical issues. While the first conference dealt with the elusive topic of beauty, the second addressed crucial issues of ethics. In the first section of this volume, the German philosophers Franz von Kutschera and Markus Gabriel discuss the nature of values and the reasons why we believe that normativity has a place in the world. In the second section, the British historian Jonathan Israel, the American theologian Jennifer Herdt, and the editor of the volume analyse epochal changes in our moral beliefs, due to Enlightenment, Christianity, and the general evolution of moral ideas, which is presented in a way that markedly differs from Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous account. The third section explores both the light that the exact sciences shed on the process of decision making (in the contributions by the Italian neuroscientist Camillo Padoa-Schioppa and the Canadian psychologist Clive Seligman) as well as the ethical challenges that modern science has brought forward in areas such as the responsibility of scientists, bioethics and medical ethics in chapters by the Swiss chemist and Nobel laureate Richard Ernst, the American bioethicist and historian of biology Jane Maienschein, and the American philosopher and legal scholar Anita Allen. The fourth section focuses on specific challenges of our time – the British philosopher Robin Atfield explores the principles of environmental ethics, the Swiss business ethicist Georges Enderle investigates goodness in economy, the Mexican elder statesman (former Secretary of Economy and of Foreign Affairs) Luiz Ernesto Derbez Bautista looks at the challenges of development, and the American legal scholars Steven D. Smith and Mary Ellen O’Connell examine the place of religion in the American constitution and the power of international law in limiting violence respectively. Finally, the last section consists of a chapter by the well-known Chinese intellectual Wang Hui on Lu Xun’s struggle to find a middle way between respect of one’s own tradition and the demands of globalization. There is probably no other volume in which so many different disciplines come together to try to find a convergence of perspectives on basic moral issues. The book will be invaluable to those who believe that goodness is the focal point of most academic disciplines and that academia can find a stronger point of unity in a common reflection on what goodness in various areas means.

This book takes a unique approach to the topic of poverty reduction, primarily employing an international business framework as opposed to the usual economic or political lens. Some of the key ideas explored in the book include: poverty is primarily the lack of choices, not the lack of material possessions; attacking inequality of opportunity might be a more effective means to reduce poverty than attaching inequality of wealth; political systems matter, but individuals and for-profit firms also have a vital and indispensable role in helping to create the wealth needed to reduce poverty; and an effective corporate social responsibility strategy to help reduce poverty may include finding innovative and creative ways to operate profitably in areas of the world where poverty is currently robbing too many people of the opportunity to live their version of the good life. Building on such ideas, the book advocates for private companies to expand operations into the least developed regions of the world as part of their corporate social responsibility programs and to reframe the debates away from ones focused on exploitation and economic nationalism to one of creating opportunities across political borders.

Ruggie's reports with a special emphasis on regulatory and governance issues surrounding corporate responsibility. How does international human rights law handle corporations? Are we beginning to grasp the complexities and impacts of financial markets on human rights? What kind of corporate due diligence can make supply chains more socially sustainable? Why should parent companies act when their affiliates infringe rights? What is the potential of national human rights institutions in the area of business and human rights? What is the role of states and law in the social change process promoted by the corporate responsibility movement? How do we 'orchestrate' polycentric governance regimes to ensure respect for human rights?

The quest to establish an effective regulatory mechanism to ensure that corporations comply with human rights responsibilities has gained momentum in the last decade or so, however, despite these efforts, no robust regulatory mechanism is in sight to provide effective remedies to victims of corporate human rights abuses. Against this background this book provides a theoretical framework to overcome regulatory challenges experienced in holding multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for violation of human rights.