The Importance of Human Rights for Management and Organization Studies

Business and human rights (BHR) scholarship examines the role of business in human rights violations as well as business responsibilities to respect human rights and to provide remedy where needed. BHR scholarship has been thriving over the last several decades, but it is at a turning point that begs for increased cross-disciplinary exchange. We argue that dealing systematically and explicitly with a human rights perspective in management and organization studies provides BHR scholarship with a new impetus as well as with alternative perspectives on how to understand and further advance human rights obligations on businesses. We advance two BHR conceptualizations that will provide guidance for integrating human rights in management with organization studies research and thereby enlarge the cross-disciplinary conversation on BHR: BHR as Global Governance and BHR as Sensemaking. This paper expands existing management and organization studies constructs, invites management and organization studies scholars to provide their insights into this important research domain, and discusses the implications of human rights for the firm.