Corporate power and human rights

Abstract

The rise of the modern corporation has brought a concentration of economic power which can compete on equal terms with the modern state – economic power versus political power, each strong in its own field. The state seeks in some aspects to regulate the corporation, while the corporation, steadily becoming more powerful, makes every effort to avoid such regulation. Where its own interests are concerned, it even attempts to dominate the state. The future may see the economic organism, now typified by the corporation, not only on an equal plane with the state, but possibly even superseding it as the dominant form of social organisation. The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship.¹

The pervasive influence of the corporation and its ever-increasing effects on human rights globally ‘is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage’.² Though there are doubtless many ideologies, theories or polemics that may argue that capitalism is inherently flawed in such a way that it will always inhibit the human rights cause (hence the emergence of conflicting ideologies of communism, Marxism, Mao-ism, Leninism, etc.), in this instance (and for the means of this special issue and introduction) the assumption is being held that capitalism is an immutable fact of life that we will not attempt to try and dismantle.³

Following the ‘Great Crash’ and the ensuing ‘Great Depression’, the increasingly dominant role of the corporation as a means of organising production became apparent.⁴ Sensing the zeitgeist, Berle and Means (a lawyer and a historian of economics respectively), sought to reformulate the corporation. By highlighting the effect the publicly owned and traded corporation had on the reality of property rights – the separation of control and passive property rights (or, benefit without effort or responsibility)­ – they justified reconceptualising the corporation or the ‘reorientation of enterprise’ so they embed responsible behaviour and work for the benefit of humanity.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the New Deal of the United States and the welfare state principles of the ‘great’ European powers had shifted the debate to an extent. Galbraith⁵ described a world of giant privately and state-owned corporations that cooperated with the instruments of the nation state and organised labour to create a planned economy, which apparently protected ordinary people from the pernicious greed of shareholders. They collaborated to create a veneer of manufactured economic demand, false consumer choice, administered prices and faux employee power intrinsically linked to grinding obsession with economic growth and efficient productivity, the economic success of which, ultimately, was driven by military expenditure through World War II and into the Cold War.⁶

The ‘good life’, so created, distracted people from a trend that accumulated power in the hands of a few corporations, not the democratically elected representatives of the people.⁷ Berle and Means were correct – the nation state did become dominated by the corporation – but whether these corporations had, or should have been, ‘reoriented’ to benefit communities, is a different matter.⁸ As highlighted by the influential and often quoted economist, Milton Friedman, in his 1962 publication Capitalism and Freedom ⁹:

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility [ … ], how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is? Can they decide how great a burden they are justified in placing on their stockholders to serve that social interest? Is it tolerable that these public functions of taxation, expenditure, and control be exercised by the people who happen at the moment to be in charge of particular enterprises, chosen for these groups by strictly private groups?

While Berle and Means would, no doubt, both disagree with Friedman's analysis,¹⁰ the reality of corporate behaviour in the globalised era, as illustrated by numerous books and hundreds of articles by investigative journalists and regular human catastrophes reported in the mainstream news, would suggest attempts to ‘socialise’ the corporation have failed. We are no closer to taming the corporation in 2014 than we were in 1933.

The debate

Frequently, discussions regarding corporate behaviour and the state – be that through international trade compromises and agreements, or domestic application of regulations – are reduced to philosophical disagreements which pitch big state socialist-style ideology¹¹ against neoliberal free market principles¹² that are equally ideological. Yet there are no examples of entirely successful planned economies just as there are no examples of governments that permit the unalloyed application of free market principles.¹³

In practice, contemporary human society, through the function of government, treads an uncertain path between serendipity and misfortune, arbitrary foresight and risk-aversion,¹⁴ towards poorly defined objectives with few meaningful comparative measures of success.¹⁵ For many seeking potential solutions to gigantic human problems this false dichotomy¹⁶ undermines the ability of academics and policymakers to address the nub of many key issues.¹⁷

The corporation – in contrast – suffers from no such opacity of purpose. Although Berle and Means argued this should not be the case and adherents to stakeholder theory¹⁸ might object¹⁹ that it is not the case; the weight of evidence is that business leaders and managers believe they are employed by corporations to maximise shareholder value.²⁰ This obligation is rooted in the concept of a fiduciary duty that exists between the business's employees and its shareholders where success is gauged through decontextualised competition, which occurs on stock exchanges throughout the world.

The negative implications of this myopic focus on reliable maximal shareholder returns are evidenced in various industries through regional, national and transnational activism, investigative journalism and, occasionally, whistle-blowing. They are frequently the cause of substantial public outrage worldwide (as in the case of Rana Plaza, where well over 1000 garment factory workers were killed when a building that was known to be unsafe collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013), but often they are left in relative obscurity. Many of these negative implications are summarised in, for example, The Corporation ²¹ or No Logo ²², and characterised as a ‘race-to-the-bottom’. Its positive implications, such as the reliable supply of cheap and safe goods and services ranging from food to pensions for public consumption and the mitigation of regional or temporal economic challenges through the global aggregation of risk, are frequently overlooked or taken for granted, but are no less real.²³ In short, this is not a binary debate that can meaningfully argue entirely for or against the corporation.

Purpose and scope

The intent of this special issue is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to identifying potential solutions to the negative impacts, as gauged against international human rights obligations on states, of corporate activity in the globalised era.²⁴ It assumes that no single academic discipline is capable of drawing together a sufficiently broad evidence base or range of theoretical constructs to address a human challenge that unquestionably spans economic, sociological, psychological, human rights, legal and political disciplines. Consequently, one purpose of this introduction is to illustrate the paucity of constructive academic investigation into the reality of corporate activity and decision-making as regards human rights and the resultant need to develop alternative methodologies for harnessing corporate activity for the good of humanity.

It takes as given the assertion that human rights represent the only meaningful attempt at a universally applicable a-religious ‘moral’ code – a blueprint to define reasonable regulation of human life through government – and that the corporation, in the globalised era, is the most influential and dominant form of economic activity.²⁵ Moreover, it takes as proven that corporations, despite their key role in the undoubted positive effects of globalisation did and do inhibit the provision of and on occasion violate human rights.²⁶

In a previous journal article²⁷ it is argued that CSR is currently the dominant response to the tension outlined above, but that CSR is doomed to fail because no matter how thorough and well-intentioned a CSR policy is, from a shareholders perspective, the commercial value of globalisation is cost reduction, while more humane operational practice will, almost universally, increase costs.²⁸ Importantly, individuals employed by the business are socialised to think from a ‘corporate perspective’ which precludes them from making business decisions that ignore business logic which identifies shareholder value as the business's paramount concern.

There is an enormous quantity and rich history of literature exploring the personality of the corporation and the fiduciary duties of its employees.²⁹ Equally, scores of academics, activists and journalists have written reams surveying and analysing the nature and purpose, the positives and negatives, of industrialisation, the corporation, globalisation, CSR and business ethics, the role of the United Nations and the Bretton-Woods organisations, and the application of national and international law in relation to trade and corporate activity. This journal is not intended to supplement this work.

Neither is this journal intended to contribute to the existing vein of work undertaken by human rights professionals and academics. This is because the editors of this journal have not in their research to-date identified any books or journal articles by human rights scholars that attempt to move the discussion around human rights and the corporation beyond assessing the measurable effectiveness of CSR or asserting the need for better, or the better application of, regulations.

This paucity of creative thought is well illustrated by Ann Zammit in Development at Risk: Rethinking UN – Business Partnerships ³⁰ which summarises the inherent weaknesses of the existing approach but only offers solutions that evolve the existing consensus by arguing for more specific CSR commitments or the creation of regional rather than global ‘business partnerships’ rather than recognising the need for a revolutionary idea.

Since the 1930s there have been two primary approaches to managing the corporation from a human perspective. One argument that is essentially rooted in the thinking of Berle and Means, which has since been updated to some extent by the thinking of Edward Freeman and is popular amongst the CSR community, is that corporations can, or at least should, act with conscience. The other asserts that, whether or not you think CSR is a positive trend, the only way to control the corporation is through behavioural regulation. We argue that this bifurcation of thinking essentially sums up the entire debate and has not moved on significantly in a century.

The majority of respected commentators agree that regulation is the only solution but that such regulation is impossible unless there is a world parliament of some description. Given the world parliament approach seems phenomenally unlikely, CSR is the only option available. Yet CSR is a false option because it most likely cannot achieve the goal of taming business and may actually prevent humanity from collectively understanding that business has been designed by humans to facilitate the production and transfer of the goods necessary for life and enjoyment.³¹ This journal is an attempt to address this quandary.

The special issue

The range and quality of the contributions to this special issue reflect the growing body of academic literature that seeks to dissolve the tension between the ever-pervasive influences of global business on human rights. Though each article explores different themes, disciplines and approaches, each of the papers has relevance to the others; they serve to illuminate each other and, as a group, present incredibly interesting conversation on the theme of corporate power and human rights. The contributions to this special issue reflect upon gaps in current scholarship, many use a multidisciplinary approach to their subjects, and they all offer an original insight to the conversation on the issue of human rights in the financial age.

The original research and quantitative analysis found in ‘Corporate Human Rights Commitments and the Psychology of Business Acceptance of Human Rights Duties: A Multi-Industry Analysis’ by Kendyl Salcito, Mark Wielga, Burton H. Singer and Chris Wielga³² seeks, amongst other things, to demonstrate the degree to which companies have adopted human rights in their company policies. The article highlights the disparities in the adoption of human rights language amongst global corporations. The authors find that 55% of companies included in their analysis have not fully accepted the responsibilities set for them in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which­ – for better or for worse ­– seems to have become the yardstick by which corporate responsibility is measured, into company CSR reports. The research presented in the article shows European-based oil and gas companies scoring the highest in the adoption of human rights responsibility (as set forth in the Guiding Principles), with 80 % acceptance of those responsibilities found in their company policies.

The aforementioned findings of Salcito et al. present an interesting comparison to the issues described in ‘Extreme Energy, “Fracking” and Human Rights: A New Field for Human Rights Impact Assessments?’ by Short et al.,³³ namely in the mishandling of human rights in the context of energy extraction. The implications that can be interpreted from the findings in the article by Short et al., based on the gathered information from anti-fracking protesters in the United Kingdom, Europe and elsewhere, is that despite the inclusion of human rights language or objectives in company policy or CSR statements, human rights continue to be maligned in the pursuit of big business interests. Short et al. discover in their research an alarmingly high rate of ‘interaction’ between the police and protesters involved in the anti-fracking protests, which hints at government involvement, as well as business, in a lack of human rights compliance. The findings of Short et al . further support the reputation that (especially) the United Kingdom has for mishandling protest situations and the tension between those who wish to protest and the police.³⁴

Many conventional oil and gas companies have pursued fracking or other forms of unconventional energy – and the high percentage of oil and gas companies who include Guiding Principles' responsibilities in their policies (as found by Salcito et al.) begs us to consider why, if the companies are engaging with human rights, do gross violations of human rights persist? A potential explanation may be found in Christian Scheper's article ‘From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing: Human Rights and the Power of Corporate Practice'.³⁵ Scheper posits that international business and corporations appropriate the language and concepts of international human rights and remake them to fit the business world. Businesses manipulate the normative language and concepts of human rights to their own advantage rather than adjusting business practice to meet normative standards. The practice of moulding rights language and objectives to meet the needs of businesses as defined by Scheper could erode the efficacy of human rights in the business context and perhaps explains why, despite the increase in human rights policies enacted by businesses, the relationship between business and human rights at ground level remains fraught. Looking at this dilemma through the lens of the sociology of critique, Scheper presents an insightful and unique position on the much-debated CSR topic and offers yet another explanation of why CSR is failing to effect any real change.

Social licence is an increasingly popular concept for protesters and communities that wish to make a human rights claim and who have no alternative (or conventional) route to access their rights. The social licence claim has been effective. In New South Wales, for example, the ‘lock the gate'³⁶ campaign used the idea of social licence to refuse community consent to fracking operations; a refusal that has resulted in many changes in that community and many others like it in Australia. However, as Sally Wheeler suggests in ‘Global Production, CSR and Human Rights: The Courts of Public Opinion and the Social License to Operate',³⁷ social licence or ‘the courts of public opinion’ may yet be another confusion to add to the gamut of CSR-type strategies that companies employ to gain the trust of investors, stakeholders, and the general public. Wheeler echoes the finding of Salcito et al. that only about half of corporations include any human rights-specific language or obligations in their company polices. This seems to suggest that a CSR policy does not necessarily include any human rights-specific intentions; further illustrating the irony that, for many corporations, being socially responsible does not mean engaging with human rights. The discussion of the failure of CSR to appropriately address public concerns lays in the foreground of Wheeler's discussion of the concept of social licence.

As Wheeler so aptly summarises, social licence is ‘what is left in the absence of a structure of legal enforcement’. Wheeler takes a close and pragmatic look at Ruggie's Guiding Principles; amongst other insightful criticisms of the Guiding Principles is the observation of a lack of methodology for the production of accurate company reporting on human rights and the danger that all the hard work put into business and human rights dilemmas (i.e. Ruggie's Guiding Principles, etc.) will be left to the chaos of a system with no set rules. The Guiding Principles make an assumption that corporations will comply with their duty to respect as they would be subjected to the ‘courts of public opinion’, but with no standards by which to set what a social licence entails it leaves itself open for misuse. Given that international law is still problematic, the Guiding Principles have no discernible guidance on the reporting requirement of companies, and that most corporate activity does not generate media interest which means the ‘public’ are unaware of issues, the concept of social licences as a way to ensure that companies comply with international standards (as set by the Guiding Principles) is, as Wheeler points out, unlikely.

Wheeler also discusses the conflated nature of global supply chains (or ‘global value chains’) and how these chains make tracking human rights abuses impossible and, incidentally, presents an almost insurmountable challenge when it comes to company reporting. A similar dilemma is posed with financial supply chains in ‘The Government Does Nothing: A Human Rights Perspective on the (UK) Financial Industry’.³⁸ Samuel Prout and Manette Kaisershot, in exploring the relationship between the financial industry, the state and human rights, suggest the activities of businesses, especially financial firms, are too complex in many cases to empirically link them with human rights violations. The intricacies involved in tracing the activities of financial business to human rights violations does not, of course, mean the link does not exist, but the result has been that the legislation and regulation have remained largely unchanged and unchallenged for financial firms since the crisis of 2008 despite ongoing public scrutiny of bad corporate behaviour.

Prout and Kaisershot point out that through funding or direct involvement in various business activities, the financial industry does much to malign human rights worldwide. The government, meanwhile, seems to have no policy in place for those who feel their rights have been or continue to be put at risk by the behaviour of large corporations and financial firms; these individuals have little state protection for their rights or agency through which to access their rights. Though Ruggie's Guiding Principles have put state responsibility at the heart of the business and human rights problem it seems many states have yet to acknowledge the role that these financial behemoths play in the maintaining of global inequalities and the part they play in human rights issues worldwide.

Sarah Knuckey and Eleanor Jenkin also address the lack of remedy available to victims in their article ‘Privatizing (in)justice?: Using Corporate Grievance Mechanisms to Remedy Grave Human Rights Violations’.³⁹ Knuckey and Jenkin investigate the efficacy of ‘operational grievance mechanisms’ (OGMs) as a potential remedy for human rights violations. OGMs are not a state-sponsored mechanism and they were not intended to remedy human rights violations, but they have been used to function as such. Knuckey and Jenkin have fashioned a new term for OGMs discussed in their article, calling them an ‘operational-level reparations mechanism’ (ORM) to distinguish them from traditional OGMs. The ORM is ‘new form of transnational privatised justice’, which throws up some interesting questions about the role of the private company occupying human rights functions that conventionally (and according to the Guiding Principles) are reserved by the state. Primary amongst these questions are: should companies be in charge of paving the way in transnational justice? Is it appropriate to put the rights of people in the hands of an industry whose main objective is to maximise profit? It is a worrying proposition.

As Wheeler's criticism effectively demonstrates, criticism of the Guiding Principles is that they are voluntary and provide no set enforcement mechanisms; the same criticism is levelled at the ORM process by Knuckey and Jenkin with the additional concern of allowing business to be the standard setter in transnational justice. The possibility of a global, legally enforceable human rights regime seems beyond the realm of possibility, but the alternatives are not appealing. The Guiding Principles, which left the responsibility of business and human rights to the state, enforced a problematic power dynamic between the state, business and human rights. In this ménage a trois the state is limited in its legal reach by finite boundaries (both physical and theoretical), business is able to transcend most state boundaries, and human rights violations caused by business occur in most states, which creates a legal jurisdictional grey area (or governance gaps). The governance dilemma seemed a circular quandary with no practicable solution. However, Daniel Augenstein and David Kinley posit a convincing argument that dissolves the issue of limitations of state power versus the far-reaching effects of global business in ‘Beyond the 100 Acre Wood: In Which International Human Rights Law Finds New Ways to Tame Global Corporate Power’.⁴⁰

There is a dilemma or perceived dilemma that transnational business and the concept of state responsibility inherently clash which makes transnational justice a Sisyphean task. Augenstein and Kinley dissect this argument and find that nothing about a state's responsibility means that states cannot or should not take responsibility outside their boundaries. A state's boundaries are as much a theoretical perception as they are a physical or legal boundary and the concept of the state's limitations are changing. Rulings of the European Court of Human Rights support extraterritorial responsibilities of the state, or, rather, decisions on cases recently have suggested that the distinctions between ‘extraterritorial’ and ‘territorial’ are beginning to be less important, relevant or considered in rulings. The central point of the article is best summed up in the authors’ own words: ‘[ … ] there is nothing preordained or immutable about a state's jurisdictional territory and all the way in which it structures relationships between spaces, events, and people, including the allocation of rights and responsibilities'. The authors quite expertly and convincingly shatter the argument that the responsibility of the state is such that it excuses a state's responsibility for human rights violations in any situation. The case law that Augenstein and Kinley draw upon to support their argument hints at the possibility there is a real future for international human rights law.

While Augenstein and Kinley provide a useful solution to the problem on transnational justice, Nicholas Connolly in ‘CSR is Dead: Long Live Pigouvian Taxation’⁴¹ presents another approach to dissolving the tensions between global corporate regimes and human rights. By revitalising the much overlooked ideas of economist Arthur Pigou, Connolly proposes an entirely realistic solution that may be useful in bringing big business into compliance with human rights standards that exists outside ‘traditional’ human rights agencies (i.e. the law). Connolly's proposition is centred on the idea of taxes that recognise the human rights impact of the underlying product; in Connolly's proposal tax would be applied to businesses in a sliding scale that is calibrated on the human rights impact of that company or its products.

According to the analysis done by Salcito et al., consumers are not driving corporate change. As established earlier in this introduction, CSR has been largely ineffective in curtailing human rights abuses. Alternative mechanisms lack structure and enforceability. The state cannot be relied upon to properly address or recognise human rights concerns arising from business practice. A transnational human rights regime, though possible, is still a way off. Perhaps a Pigouvian tax scheme could be an effective way for states to recognise their human rights responsibility? A Pigouvian tax structure also might have the potential for recalibrating the underlying social understanding of consumer demands and their associated human rights costs. If two seemingly similar products vary greatly in price due to ethically imposed tax then consumers will be able to recognise that x product or service does y human rights harm. Connolly presents a very interesting proposal with potential for real impact that is worthy of further exploration.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, is another proposed solution to the problem presented by business and human rights. In ‘Defending Corporate Social Responsibility: Myanmar and the Lesser Evil’ Andrew Fagan⁴² presents an argument for the use of CSR in developing a human rights dialogue with businesses in Myanmar. CSR has, in this special issue alone, undergone a fire of criticism from lack of enforceability to lack of methodology and everywhere in between, but just when CSR seemed fully, entirely discredited Fagan presents an argument that CSR can be useful in establishing some semblance of human rights consideration in regimes that previously have had no human rights understanding. Fagan looks closely at Myanmar and how the use of CSR on Myanmar at least introduces human rights concepts into a space that otherwise would be completely devoid of human rights considerations. Fagan takes all the criticisms of CSR into consideration when he considers it as the ‘lesser of two evils’; where CSR is providing however minimal protection or, at the very least, consideration of human rights ideas where they might otherwise be given no consideration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Connolly and Manette Kaisershot are the founders of The Corporate Power and Human Rights Project at the Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Notes

1. Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation & Private Property (Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1932; Transaction Publishers, 2007), 313.

2. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1.1. Prologue).

3. This despite, of course, the acknowledgement that a society/state built on a growth model (i.e. economic growth that is always expanding) is unsustainable and presents its own theoretical and practical problems.

4. John Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (Hamish Hamilton, 1955 ; Penguin, 2009).

5. In his books The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957; Penguin, 1999); and The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin Company [1967] (1985)).

6. Galbraith, The Affluent Society; and Galbraith, The New Industrial State; and Gardiner Means, ‘Collective Capitalism and Economic Theory’, in The Corporation Take-over, ed. Andrew Hacker (Anchor Books, 1965).

7. Andrew Hacker, ‘The Elected and the Anointed: Two American Elites', The American Political Science Review 55, no. 3 ( 1961): 539–49.

8. See Paddy Ireland's ‘Corporate Governance, Stakeholding, and the Company – Towards a Less Degenerate Capitalism’, Journal of Law and Society 23, no. 3 ( 1996): 287–320, for a summary of the rise of managerialism and the ‘socialised business, its fall in the 1980s and an assessment of Stakeholder Theory in the globalised world'.

9. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press [1962] (2002)), 133–4.

10. See: Means, ‘Collective Capitalism and Economic Theory’.

11. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press [1944] (2001)).

12. Fredrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge [1944] (2001)).

13. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Dani Rodrick, One Economics, Many Recipes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

14. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (London: Penguin, 2007).

15. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (London: Penguin, 2009).

16. Consider the ‘aid debate’ characterised by the disagreement between William Easterly, The White Man's Burden, Oxford University Press, 2006 and Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin, 2005.

17. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics (London: Penguin, 2011).

18. Stakeholder theory is often referenced within the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature as evidence that business management can profitably take various ‘social stakeholder’ views into account and can therefore be manoeuvred to act ethically. In fact, Freeman argues that business leaders cannot separate CSR from economic results because CSR can affect economic results, which is very different from proposing that CSR should determine what economic objectives a business should pursue or how a business can best pursue its economic objectives.

19. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pitman, 1984; Cambridge University Press, 2010).

20. Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (London: Penguin, 2007); Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Battle for Democracy in an Age of Big Business (Icon Books, 2007); Joel Bakan, The Corporation (Constable, 2004); Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962); Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century (London: Penguin, 2005); David Vogel, The Market for Virtue (Brookings Institution Press, 2005); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (Houghton Mifflin Books, 2004; Penguin, 2009).

21. Bakan, The Corporation.

22. Naomi Klein, No Logo (Flamingo, 2001).

23. See William Meyer, Human Rights and International Political Economy in Third World Nations (Praeger, 1998); and Robert Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), for a discussion of why the globalised finance system benefits humanity and how it can be improved.

24. Sen, Development as Freedom, 240–2, sees human rights as an antidote to the remorseless social and cultural change initiated by globalisation .

25. As opposed to the informal economy, which for most people globally is the dominant form of economic interaction (Sen, Development as Freedom).

26. Evidence to support this statement can be found in Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto, English ed. (The New Press, 2010 ); Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010); John Ghazvinian, Untapped: The Struggle for Africa's Oil (Harcourt, 2007); Ed Vulliamy, Amexica (Bodley Head, 2010); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (Penguin, 2001); Klein, No Logo; Bakan, The Corporation, and countless news stories.

27. Nicholas Connolly, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: A Duplicitous Distraction?’, International Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 8 (2012): 1228–49.

28. There is extensive debate about whether managers should assume short-term profit-oriented decisions provide optimal value for the shareholder (John Hutton, The State We're In (Vintage, 1996)) and it has been argued the Anglo-American shareholder-focussed interpretation of capitalism should be replaced by a more ‘social’ interpretation of capitalism such as that operated by German or Japanese businesses (John Kay and Aubrey Silberston, Corporate Governance (National Institute of Economic Review, 1995)). For the purposes of this review, however, this debate is irrelevant because corporate managers – with their decisions shaped by the rigours of globalised production – appear to substantially ignore this interpretation of their responsibilities.

29. Adolf Berle, ‘Corporate Powers as Powers in Trust', Harvard Law Review 44 (1931): I049; Dodd, E. Merrick, ‘For Whom Are Corporate Managers Trustees?', Harvard Law Review 45, no. 7 (1932): 1145–63.

30. Ann Zammit, Development at Risk: Rethinking UN - Business Partnerships (South Centre and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2003).

31. Connolly, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’.

32. Kendyl Salcito, Mark Wielga, Burton H. Singer and Chris Wielga, ‘Corporate Human Rights Commitments and the Psychology of Business Acceptance of Human Rights Duties: A Multi-Industry Analysis', The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 637–696.

33. Short et al., ‘Extreme Energy, “Fracking” and Human Rights: A New Field for Human Rights Impact Assessments?’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 697–736.

34. See, for example, the Equality and Human Right Commission (EHRC) report ‘Human Rights Review 2012: Article 11: Freedom of Assembly and Association', http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/documents/humanrights/hrr_article_11.pdf (accessed 1 November 2014), where the EHRC highlight several issues with United Kingdom policy on protest that may have the consequence of eroding the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 11, right to peaceful protest. Continued media coverage suggests that the tension between police and protesters has not been effectively dealt with (see, for example, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/05/three-arrests-student-protest-university-of-london). The statement by Mr Maina Kiai, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association at the conclusion of his visit to the United Kingdom on 23rd January 2013 highlights, again, further problems with protests in the United Kingdom and, especially, the role of the police (who continue to use the controversial practice of ‘kettling’) See more at: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12945&LangID=E#sthash.bx82zNV4.dpuf (accessed 1 November 2014).

35. Christian Scheper, ‘From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing: Human Rights and the Power of Corporate Practice’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 737–754.

36. http://www.lockthegate.org.au/

37. Sally Wheeler, ‘Global Production, CSR and Human Rights: The Courts of Public Opinion and the Social License to Operate’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 757–778.

38. Samuel Prout and Manette Kaisershot, ‘These Are Financial Times: A Human Rights Perspective on the (UK) Financial Industry’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 779–800.

39. Sarah Knuckey and Eleanor Jenkin, ‘Company-created Remedy Mechanisms for Serious Human Rights Abuses: A Promising New Frontier for the Right to Remedy?', The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 801–827.

40. Daniel Augenstein and David Kinley, ‘Beyond the 100 Acre Wood: In Which International Human Rights Law Finds New Ways to Tame Global Corporate Power’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 828–848.

41. Nicholas Connolly, ‘CSR is Dead: Long Live Pigouvian Taxation’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 849–866.

42. Andrew Fagan, ‘Defending Corporate Social Responsibility: Myanmar and the Lesser Evil’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015): 867–882.