Business and Human Rights: Understanding the UN Guiding Principles from the Perspective of Transnational Business Governance Interactions

Perkovic

2019

Competition & Change

This article analyses contractual governance practices within the value chains of large companies based in the USA and Europe between 2012 and 2017 with focus on human and labour rights. In line with the existing scholarship, we find that the use of contractual governance for safeguarding human and labour rights is best practice among large American and European businesses. The results show that value chain contractual governance should be studied in an interdisciplinary environment taking both legal and non-legal aspects into consideration. Moreover, we detect a general positive impact of the business and human rights regulatory wave of 2010-2011 on sustainable contractual governance practices.

Section: Bhr Regulation and Contracts -Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tendencies in contractual governance to promote human and labour rights in transnational supply chains

Perkovic

2019

Competition & Change

Journal of Law and Society

“…This, for example, is the case within company internal approaches 71 as well as broader regime-based approaches to human rights as embedded in strategies of Corporate Social Responsibility. 72 Such strategies are aimed at generalising communication across contextual boundaries, thereby allowing for multi-contextual embeddedness, i.e., the processes, thereby giving them a character as constitutional principles establishing hierarchies of norms vis-à-vis globally-unfolding economic processes.…”

Section: From Colonialism To Global Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constitutionalizing Connectivity: The Constitutional Grid of World Society

Kjaer

2018

Global law settings are characterized by a structural pre‐eminence of connectivity norms, a type of norm which differs from coherency or possibility norms. The centrality of connectivity norms emerges from the function of global law, which is to increase the probability of transfers of condensed social components, such as economic capital and products, religious doctrines, and scientific knowledge, from one legally structured context to another within world society. This was the case from colonialism and colonial law to contemporary global supply chains and human rights. Both colonial law and human rights can be understood as serving a constitutionalizing function aimed at stabilizing and facilitating connectivity. This allows for an understanding of colonialism and contemporary global governance as functional, but not as normative, equivalents.

“…Second, labour actively promoted the ILO's special status to advance its own interests. Through this combination of passive and active piggy-backing (Buhmann 2015), labour prevailed on most of the issues that mattered to it.…”

Section: Norm Formation: Leveraging the New Iso-ilo Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive Strategies for Advancing Marginalized Actors in Transnational Governance Contests: Labour and the Making of ISO 26000

Wood

2018

SSRN Journal

This chapter explores the role of organized labour in drafting the ISO 26000 guidance standard on social responsibility (SR) as a case study of the circumstances in which weaker actors can take advantage of transnational business governance interactions (TBGIs) to achieve regulatory outcomes that advance their interests. Organized labour initially opposed the development of an ISO standard on SR and was vastly outnumbered when it joined this project in a defensive posture. Yet it achieved remarkably wide and strong protection for workers in ISO 26000 compared to other leading SR initiatives. Integrating theories of legitimation and regulatory enrolment, I theorize regulator-audience relationships and the circumstances in which one can expect a regulator to acquiesce to a particular audience's legitimation demands. I argue that organized labour was unlikely on its own to secure ISO's acquiescence to its legitimation demands, but it succeeded by both proactively leveraging and passively coasting upon the delicate relationship between a transnational regulator that lacked legitimacy and other regulatory resources-ISO-and another actor-the International Labour Organization (ILO)-that could supply those resources. I theorize a triadic strategy in which a regulatory underdog exploits legitimation differentials between a legitimacy-poor regulator and a legitimacy-rich booster to advance its interests, and the booster is doubly enrolled by the regulator (to enhance the regulator's legitimacy) and the underdog (to boost the underdog's effectiveness).