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The purpose of this paper is to discuss a number of important recent developments in the area of business and human rights and considers the impact of these developments for accounting, assurance and reporting. Following the UN endorsement of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the Guiding Principles) in June 2011, initiatives related to their implementation have advanced at a rapid pace. Despite the centrality of accounting, assurance and reporting to some of the key initiates – accounting research has, hitherto, lagged behind this growing momentum. In order to address this lacunae, this paper develops an agenda for future research in the area of accounting and human rights. In doing so, the paper provides an overview of the important contributions advanced by the other papers in this special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ).

This paper draws together and identifies key issues and themes related to the rapidly evolving research and policy domain of business and human rights and considers the relevance of these issues to accounting research.

The paper highlights the wide-ranging impact the Guiding Principles and other developments in business and human rights have for accounting practice and draws attention to potential areas of research for accounting scholars. In particular, the paper highlights the emergence of business and human rights due diligence requirements, including their management and reporting. Further, the paper draws attention to the development of business and human rights reporting and assurance practice – which, while still in its infancy, has gathered considerable momentum and support.

The paper provides important insights into emerging issues and developments in business and human rights that have clear relevance to accounting research and practice.

This paper, and the other contributions to this special issue of AAAJ, provide a basis and a research agenda for accounting scholars seeking to undertake research in this significant and emerging field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the state-business nexus in responses to human rights violations in businesses and questions the efficacy of the UN guiding principles on human rights in businesses, in particular in the ready-made garments (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. Drawing on Cohen’s notion of “denial” and Black’s (2008) legitimacy and accountability relationships of state and non-state actors, the study seeks to explain why such “soft” global regulations remain inadequate.

The empirical work for this paper is based on the authors’ participation in two multiple-stakeholder advisory consultation meetings for the RMG sector in Bangladesh and 11 follow-up interviews. This is supplemented by documentary evidence on human rights disasters, responses of the state and non-state actors and human rights reports published in national and international newspapers.

The paper provides clear evidence that the state-business nexus perpetuates human rights disasters. The study also shows that the Bangladeshi state, ruled by family-led political parties, is more inclined to protect businesses that cause human rights disasters than to ensure human rights in businesses. The economic conditions of the RMG industry and accountability and legitimacy relationships between state and non-state actors have provided the necessary background for RMG owners to continue to violate the safety and security of the workplace and maintain inhumane working conditions.

Complex state politics, including family, kinship and wealthy supporters, and economic circumstances have serious implications for the efficacy of the UN guiding principle on human rights for business. This paper calls for broader political and economic changes, nationally and internationally.

The study highlights the perpetuation of corporate human rights abuses by the state-business nexus, and indicates that human rights issues continue to be ignored through a discourse of denial. This is explained in terms of legitimacy and accountability relationships between state and non-state actors, bounded by complex political and economic conditions.

Companies are often accused of using sustainability disclosures as public relations tools to manage financial and non-financial stakeholders' impressions. The purpose of our study was firstly to determine how comprehensive the human rights disclosures of a sample of large international companies were and secondly, whether different narrative styles are associated with levels of disclosure to manage readers' impressions about the company. We analysed the public human rights disclosures for 154 large, international companies obtained from the UN Guiding Principles Reporting website. On average, companies complied with only one-third of the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework criteria. Communication about policies has the highest compliance, whilst communication about determining which human rights aspects are salient to the company, remedies for transgressions and stakeholder engagement have the lowest disclosure. When we split the sample between high disclosure and low disclosure companies, we found that the readability of the human rights disclosures is exceptionally low and even more so for low disclosure companies. Low disclosure companies used words implying Satisfaction significantly more than high disclosure companies, which provides some support for suspecting that low disclosure companies practise impression management by only presenting a ‘rosy picture’, as well as obfuscation via low readability. We add to the literature on impression management by large corporations in their sustainability reporting, and specifically human rights disclosures, by revealing how the interplay of low disclosure, low readability and overuse of words signalling Satisfaction contributes to impression management, rather than sincere attempts at accountability to all stakeholders.

This research develops a set of specific modern slavery disclosure principles for organisations. It critically evaluates seven legislative Acts from five different countries and 16 guidelines and directives from international organisations. By undertaking an in-depth content analysis, the research derives an index comprising nine principles and 49 disclosure items to promote best-practice disclosure in tackling modern slavery. We promote nine active principles for organisations to implement and disclose: recognising modern slavery practices, identifying risks, publishing a modern slavery risk prevention policy, proactive in assessing and addressing risks, assessing efficacy of actions, garnering internal and external oversight, externally communicating modern slavery risk mitigation, implementing a suppliers' assessment and code of conduct to ensure transparency and specifying consequences for non-compliance. The research is motivated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8, which focusses on economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work. The research findings will assist practitioners seeking to discover and disclose evidence of modern slavery practices and their mitigation to minimise and encourage the elimination of this unethical and illegal practice in domestic and global supply chains and operations.

The United Nations Guiding Principles locate human rights at the centre of the corporate social responsibility agenda and provide a substantial platform for the development of business and human rights policy and practice. The initiative gives opportunity and focus for the rethinking and reconfiguration of corporate accountability for human rights. It also presents a threat: the danger, as we see it, is that the Guiding Principles are interpreted and implemented in an uncritical way, on a “humanitarian” model of imposed expertise. The critical and radical democratic communities have tended to be, perhaps rightly, suspicious of rights talk and sceptical of any suggestion that rights and the discourse of human rights can play a progressive role. The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues from a radical perspective.

This paper uses insights taken from Jacques Rancière’s work to argue that there is vital critical potential in human rights. There is an obvious negativity to Rancière’s thought insofar as it conceives of the political as a challenge to the existing social order. The positive dimension to his work, which has its origins in his commitment to and tireless affirmation of the fact of equality, is equally important, if perhaps less obvious. Together the negative and positive moments provide a dynamic conception of human rights and a dialectical view of the relation between human rights and the social order, which enables us to overcome much of the criticism levelled at human rights by certain theorists.

Rancière’s conception of the political puts human rights inscriptions, and the traces of equality they carry, at the heart of progressive politics. The authors close the paper with a discussion of the role that accounting for human rights can play in such a democratic politics, and by urging, on that basis, the critical accounting community to cautiously embrace the opportunity presented by the Guiding Principles.

This paper has some novelty in its application of Rancière’s thinking on political theory to the problems of critical accounting and in particular the critical potential of accounting and human rights. The paper makes a theoretical contribution to a critical understanding of the relationship between accounting, human rights, and democracy.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the possibilities and difficulties in the development of pragmatic solutions to address human rights issues in global value chains in line with the existing institutional framework.

Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual chapter examining the development and impact of a new public–private governance institution, namely the protect–respect–remedy framework developed under the auspices of the UN.

Findings – The concept of due diligence that is central to the UN framework has been incorporated into other codes by the OECD and the IFC, and offers a promising way of defining the human rights responsibilities of MNEs. At the same time, the information required for an effective due diligence analysis is difficult to gather, and requires extensive cooperation with nonmarket partners.

Originality/value – The chapter combines perspectives from international business and legal studies to achieve a better understanding of the development and implications of a new governance instrument concerning the human rights obligations of MNEs.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Drawing on Fairclough (1989, 2005), the purpose of this paper is to explore how respect for human rights is emerging and being operationalized in the discourse of 30 Fortune 500 companies in the mining, pharmaceutical and chemical industries at two key points in the recent evolution of the UN’s business and human rights agenda. Specifically the paper explores the scope of rights for which corporations are accountable and, more specifically, the degree of responsibility a company assumes for enacting these rights.

The authors draw on Fairclough (1992) and Mashaw (2007) in a critical discourse analysis of corporate human rights disclosures of ten companies in each of the chemical, mining and pharmaceutical industries at two points in time coinciding with: first, the publication in 2008 of the Protect, Respect, Remedy policy framework; and second, the endorsement by the UN in 2011, of a set of Guiding Principles designed to implement this framework.

The study finds four grammars of respect and three different scopes of rights within specific corporate accountably disclosures on their responsibility to respect rights. Corporate constructions of human rights are broad: from labour rights, through social and political rights, to the right to health and a clean environment. The corporate discourse is one of promoting, realizing and upholding rights that construct the corporation as an autonomous source of power beyond the state.

The paper contends that the structuring of this emerging discourse is important, not only because the meaning and scope of corporate respect for rights affects the lived experience of some of the most vulnerable in society, but also because it reflects a shifting the relationship between the state, business and society (Muchlinski 2012).

The authors develop a way of conceptualizing business human rights responsibilities and contend that the corporate human rights discourse of respect reflects a significant reconfiguration of political power.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a wide range of significant developments that have emerged in the wake of the UNs endorsement of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs) in June 2011. In particular, the paper offers a preliminary assessment of how the GPs’ corporate responsibility to respect human rights has been interpreted and to what extent it has been operationalised through government action, business behaviour and the praxis of other social actors.

The paper provides a comprehensive assessment of a number of key developments related to Pillar 2 of the GPs – concerned with the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. More specifically, the paper considers a range of elements relating to corporate human rights due diligence, including: establishing a corporate human rights policy; the undertaking of human rights impact assessment; integrating findings of impact assessment, and; corporate human rights reporting.

Based on the assessment of recent developments and initiatives, the paper suggests that the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, as expressed in Pillar 2 of the GPs, embodies the culmination of significant progress in the sphere of corporate accountability. In doing so, the paper documents a plethora of innovations in regulation and praxis, led by actors in government and the corporate sector, civil society organisations, labour unions and others, in the areas of human rights due diligence, impact assessment and reporting. Yet overall, change is slow and partial and the results achieved are still unsatisfactory. Severe business-related human rights abuses remain endemic in many industry sectors and in many countries.

The implementation of the GPs is at a key stage of development, with a multitude of initiatives and actors attempting to develop and influence new forms of corporate governance. This paper provides an overview and assessment of these key developments.

This paper provides an important assessment and synthesis of key developments related to corporate responsibility for human rights.