Foreign direct liability litigation against businesses is still a growing trend in European domestic courts, going on for over two decades.1 With absent effective remedies in host states, victims of human rights abuses committed by transnational corporations’ subsidiaries try to get access to remedy in the courts of the home states of the parent companies. A crucial factor for whether such cases can succeed, is the viability of the claims against the parent companies allegedly involved in the abuses. The principal legal route that victims have used to hold parent companies liable is through common law negligence claims.

After a decade, different businesses adhere to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Some key commercial entities, however, remain largely outside of the UNGPs universe, including professional service providers (PSPs) who are retained by businesses to provide  expert advice and services. These advisors include lawyers, management consultants, architects and others. Some may have specialized units that provide advice on the UNGPs when retained solely for that purpose. But when asked to provide general commercial legal advice, to design a building, or restructure a business, such advisors do not typically appear to apply the UNGPs, to identify negative human rights impacts and tailor their advice in a way that prevents or mitigates such impacts. This article explores the connection between the advice provided by PSPs and negative human rights impacts. It underscores the critical need for these advisors to align their business processes and advisory services with the UNGPs to avoid being enablers of human rights abuses.

This study examines activities and processes through which projects of moral regulation are implemented as well as lived, transformed, and resisted by their targeted actors. Our ethnographic study focuses on discourses and practices of civic duty for orderly and hygienic conduct in the rehabilitation of marketplaces in Yaoundé, Cameroon. By drawing on the inhabited institutions approach and the literature on ethics as practice, our analysis extends research on moral work to put forward a perspective on moral regulation as a situated practice. We show how moral work is built on individual reflections but is simultaneously negotiated through actors’ relationships, that is, responsibilities to family, interactions within the community, and personal history.

Humor has been positively perceived in general. However, research has shown that a leader should adopt humor with care and only after considering the relevant context, such as cultural differences. This study was undertaken to gain insight into how leader humor is perceived in the predominantly Confucian culture of Taiwan, through a series of in-depth interviews with individuals from throughout the hierarchies of various organizations. Overall, our participants expressed conflicting attitudes toward leader humor in the workplace, depending on the place and time of their leader humor experience. Specifically, leader humor was deemed more effective in informal domains and when a good leader–follower relationship exists. The findings echo the implicit theory of leadership and highlight the need to consider the context when exercising leader humor in Confucian cultures. Implications and future study directions are discussed.

Hedge fund activists transfer relevant prior work experience to their activism campaigns. Categorizing activists based on past employment at investment banks (generalists), private equity or special situations partnerships (specialists), or other firms (nonfinancial experts), we relate activists’ prior work experience to their choices and outcomes. Both generalists with codifiable skills and specialists with tacit skills contribute to successful outcomes, but differences in these skills lead to differences in activism processes. Activist choices, market responses, target firm responses, and procedural aspects of activism vary with activist identity. Our analysis examines activists’ heterogeneous skills and highlights their importance in shaping activist interventions.

The personal traits of chief executive officers (CEOs) have been found to influence corporate policy decisions. We examine the impact of CEO past corporate distress experiences on payout policy. CEOs who have experienced a distress event in their career, while working in a non-CEO position at a different firm, subsequently alter corporate payout policy once in the CEO position. They are less likely to pay dividends and repurchase shares, pay out lower levels of dividends, and are less likely to increase dividends. They further exhibit preference toward repurchases. Overall, we report that experience-driven conservatism affects payout policy, a novel finding in the literature.

This article examines shoplifting from department stores and variety chain stores in interwar America and Britain. Patterns of shoplifting show strong similarities—with stores facing a predominantly female, and disproportionately affluent, army of amateur shoplifters, together with a much smaller corps of professional thieves. The incidence and characteristics of shoplifting are explored, together with the stores’ legal and other strategies to deter shoplifters. The article also examines why apparently prosperous women had the highest propensity to shoplift. Britain and the United States had strong commonalities in terms of open display retail formats, the methods used to deter shoplifters, and typical legal penalties. However, America had one critical difference—the much higher incidence of a type of store criminal who specialized in deliberately getting apprehended in order to sue the store for false arrest and, often, false imprisonment, slander, and a range of related charges. This reflected the higher damages typically awarded by U.S. courts compared with their British counterparts, inflated by local antagonism to retail corporations, together with a system—at least in some U.S. cities—whereby corrupt lawyers and judges connived in shoplifting acquittals that paved the way for lawsuits.

Chinese bureaucracy, with its long history and distinctive characteristics, has provided the organizational basis of governance and played a pivotal role in the economic takeoff in recent decades. Chinese bureaucracy also shows intriguing dualism between entrepreneurial activism and bureaucratic inertia, between formal rules and informal institutions, and between high responsiveness and noticeable loose coupling. In this study, I explore these distinctive features of Chinese bureaucracy through three lenses: Weber's comparative-historical approach helps locate Chinese bureaucracy in a distinct mode of domination; the Confucian lens identifies the prevalence of informal institutions that underlie bureaucratic behaviors; and the Marchian lens sheds light on the organized anarchy and set of mechanisms that shape the key characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy.

This contribution discusses business attitudes to human rights obligations and how the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) have affected them. These are best understood historically through a number of periods. The first, between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s, coincides with intergovernmental organization-based codifications relevant to corporate social responsibility. Business representatives were highly defensive towards extensive international legal obligations not only in relation to human rights but to corporate social responsibility (CSR) more generally. This was followed by a period of ‘voluntarism’. By the 1990s, businesses had accepted that there could be a link between their operations and human rights violations but continued to reject binding legal duties. Instead, businesses opted for voluntary codes of conduct based on individual corporate, or sectoral, initiatives. It was out of this period that the UN Global Compact emerged. ‘Voluntarism’ continues into the third period, the era of the UNGPs. The UNGPs can be characterized by ‘institutionalized voluntarism’ achieved through the framework for business and human rights represented by the UNGPs. Each period will be examined followed by a concluding section that considers business attitudes to an emerging fourth period that introduces legal obligations through mandatory due diligence laws.

The research and development leading to the discovery and distribution of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines demonstrated the indispensable nature of the pharmaceutical industry. While governments played an important role in financing these efforts by prepaying for dosages, it was private industry that delivered the scientific and technical miracles. At the same time, because of vaccine nationalism and hoarding, citizens of the global south have inadequate access to vaccines. This is a moral and human rights tragedy for which governments, not the pharmaceutical industry, are primarily responsible. This article argues that, as illustrated by humanitarian disaster of inadequate vaccine access in the global south, the failure of the UNGPs to adequately address the paramount role of government in human rights violations, even when there is shared responsibility with business, is a systemic failure that makes the United Nations an inappropriate forum for addressing business and human rights issues.

Drawing from conceptualizations of organizational learning and institutional complexity, we advance the understanding of how the coexistence of multiple institutional logics in a community influences firms’ learning. Viewing communities where firms and local governments coexist as clusters, our analysis of 354 firms in 39 township clusters in China shows that government logic negatively moderates the positive effect of community logic on organizational learning; however, social connections between the community and local governments mitigate this negative effect. Modeling the relationship between the two logics in this manner extends prior conceptualizations of interfirm learning as a process of isomorphic diffusion of social norms and advances understanding of the role of institutions in organizational learning. This study also offers new insights for theoretical conversations on the compatibility and incompatibility of multiple institutional logics by demonstrating when logic multiplicity leads to conflicts and when it maintains harmony.

The endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) triggered a remarkable process accelerating the recognition of human rights responsibilities for corporations in law and governance. Perhaps even more important is the emergence of an authoritative narrative on business and human rights (BHR), which arguably has the potential to overcome the often-fragmented approach to global issues. This article discusses the degree to which the BHR narrative has been able to penetrate competing powerful narratives that shape societal and regulatory responses. To what extent is the need to address the responsibility and accountability of corporations for human rights violations acknowledged? This is an especially pertinent question where it concerns imminent major global challenges such as climate change, which poses one of the greatest threats to human rights. Two major milestones of the last decade in the area of (environmental) sustainability are analysed: the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. What role does the BHR narrative play in this context?

Environmental responsibility has been increasingly emphasized in the management field. Perceived organizational environmental support is generally considered desirable within organizations. Nonetheless, both scholars and practitioners doubt that it is a panacea for enhancing employee green behavior (EGB), an important workplace behavior benefiting the environment and corporate sustainability. From a congruence perspective, this research explores when and why perceived organizational environmental support fails to increase EGB effectively. Drawing upon cue consistency theory and the corporate hypocrisy literature, we propose that perceived organizational environmental support backfires when it is incongruent with another critical cue signaling an organization's environmental stance – perceived supervisory environmental support (particularly when perceived organizational environmental support is higher than perceived supervisory environmental support). This is because the inconsistent signals of environmental support from the organization (in the form of policy commitment) and supervisor (in the form of supportive behaviors) arouse employees’ perception of corporate hypocrisy, which in turn inhibits EGB. Both the scenario experiment results (Study 1) and the polynomial regression results of the field survey data (Study 2) support our hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.

What should be the interface of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) with other regulatory regimes in the business and human rights (BHR) universe? This article explores this issue in relation to two specific contexts. First, the interface of ‘social norm’ with evolving ‘legal norms’: relation of Pillar II of the UNGPs and mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) laws as well as parent companies’ direct duty of care for negligence. Second, the interface of ‘soft norms’ and evolving ‘hard norms’: how the UNGPs should inform the proposed BHR treaty. It is argued that legal norms should align with Pillar II only in a ‘loose manner’. They should draw from and build on the HRDD concept under Pillar II, but not be constrained by it, because a hard alignment of Pillar I laws with Pillar II could undercut the independent but complementary status of the two pillars. Moreover, the UNGPs should serve only as a ‘starting point’ and not the ‘end point’ in the evolution of other hard or soft norms in the future. Such an approach would be desirable because the UNGPs alone are unlikely to be enough to challenge or confront the existing structure of irresponsibility and inequality.

Ten years after the publication of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), implementation efforts are in full swing. Companies in particular have used their existing corporate social responsibility (CSR) structures to make sense of and implement Pillar II of the UNGPs. This process has led to a co-optation of the business and human rights (BHR) agenda. One manifestation of such co-optation is the instrumentalization of CSR to confront and undermine the growing trend towards binding BHR legislation. Accordingly, this contribution conceptualizes Pillar II implementation as a process of domestication, co-optation and confrontation of the BHR agenda. It makes sense of this process by juxtaposing it with long-standing critique against CSR put forth particularly by critical management scholars, raising the question whether CSR is indeed well-equipped to drive BHR implementation efforts within companies.

This article provides an overview of the key features of multinational human rights litigation in the United Kingdom, including the development of a tort-based parent company duty of care, the principles relating to forum non conveniens and applicable law and other key procedural and practical barriers to victims’ access to justice. The article highlights some of the actual and perceived limitations of litigation. It also considers the concurrent development of and mutually reinforcing relationship between MNC tort litigation and the field of Business & Human Rights.

The decade of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) coincides with India’s National Voluntary Guidelines on businesses’ social, environmental, and economic responsibilities (NVGs) and the National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct (NGRBC) – an updated version of the NVGs. Human rights are one of the core principles in both guidelines and they draw upon the ‘Protect–Respect–Remedy’ framework of the UNGPs. The NVGs and NGRBC go beyond the UNGPs by requiring organizations not only to respect human rights, but also to promote them in their spheres of influence. Several factors, however, derailed the implementation of this progressive policy shift. This article explores the challenges in implementation and calls for the multiple actors involved to work together and shape a collaborative action plan for effective implementation of the NGRBC in the next decade. The authors reiterate the need for alternative lenses to frame the responsible business agenda within developing countries through positive obligations.