Corporate Code Switching and Remedy in Business and Human Rights
A preprint of the chapter is available here
In recent years, business and human rights initiatives have shifted the conversation about the impacts of business behavior, and businesses have had to respond. Human rights compliance through human rights due diligence allows businesses to acknowledge their role in promoting and respecting human rights from within ‘familiar frames’ of business discourse: specifically, through the language of compliance and audit (O’Kelly, 2019). None of this is neutral, however. Whether in terms of the impact of corporate human rights mechanisms ‘on the ground’ or in terms of how corporate discourses loop back into how human rights are defined and conceived, the dominant position corporations have taken in business and human rights reflects its power over how human rights are to be understood.
In this chapter we explore how corporations ‘code shift’ in managing human rights, articulating rights in general as risks to others that they are best placed to manage and govern, but articulating specific rights remedy claims as risks to the corporation itself that must be resisted.
Citation
@incollection{hopkins2024,
author = {Hopkins, Samantha and O’Kelly, Ciarán and Hackett, Ciara},
editor = {Olsen and J Schrempf-Stirling and H Van Buren, T},
publisher = {Edward Elgar},
title = {Corporate {Code} {Switching} and {Remedy} in {Business} and
{Human} {Rights}},
booktitle = {A Research Agenda for Business and Human Rights},
date = {2024-01-01},
address = {Cheltenham},
url = {https://ciaranokelly.org/publications/2024-01-01-Corporate-code-shifting-in-Business-and-Human-Rights.html},
langid = {en}
}