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This paper explores the language of corporate accounts of business and human rights. Using innovative methods drawn from computational corpus linguistics, the paper explores discussions of business and human rights in a dataset composed of 346 corporate social responsibility reports drawn from firms in extractive industries. The paper concludes that human rights are ‘put to work’ in corporate accounts by reconfiguring their meaning to draw them into the ‘familiar frames’ of business accounting narratives.
Forthcoming Social & Legal Studies. Latest draft: August, 2018
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. Corporate social responsibility and the grammar of human rights. Forthcoming Social & Legal Studies. Latest draft: August, 2018.

Preprint Code Project

. The Moral Economy of Corporate Governance. London: Palgrave, 2018.

Project

. Whose Corruption? Which Law? Law's Authority and Social Power. in F Anechiarico (ed) (2017) Legal But Corrupt: a New Perspective on Public Ethics, London: Rowman & Littlefield., 2017.

Project Publisher

. Corporate Governance as a School of Social Reform. Seattle University Law Review 36 (2) 2013, 973-997., 2013.

PDF Project

. Power and the Ethics of Reform. in HG Frederickson and RK Ghere (eds) (2013): Ethics in Public Management (2nd ed), New York: Routledge., 2013.

Preprint Project Publisher

. Internalities and the Foundations of Corporate Governance. Social & Legal Studies 21 (4) 2012, 469-489, 2012.

Preprint Project DOI

. History Begins: Shareholder Value, Accountability and the Virtuous State. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 60 (1) 2009, 35-50., 2009.

Project Pure

. The Regulation of Public Space in Northern Ireland. Irish Political Studies 22 (4), 2007, 565-584., 2007.

Project DOI

. Public Institutions, Overlapping Consensus and Trust. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9 (4), 2006, 559-572., 2006.

DOI

. Taking Tough Choices Seriously: Public Administration and Individual Moral Agency. Journal of Public Administration and Theory 16 (3), 2006, 393-415., 2006.

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Teaching & supervision

I teach on the following modules at Queen’s University Belfast:

  • LAW8223 & LAW8524: Issues in Corporate Governance

I also supervise postgraduate research projects on

  • Board governance and accountability
  • State-owned enterprises
  • Accountability in pharmaceutical pricing regulation

I welcome proposals related to how corporations think in moral terms, including how they engage with ideas of accountability, and how they generate narratives about their approaches to human rights.

Recent Posts

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3 min read rstats

The R for Data Science community has been running a ‘Tidy Tuesday’ project for a few weeks. In essence they link to a data-driven paper and a somewhat tidy version of the paper’s underlying dataset. The challenge is to develop some visualisations etc from the data, all within the R for Data Science approach to working with R. This week’s challenge is drawn from an article on Australia’s pay gap. The article’s data is sourced here.

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