Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 22, 2011

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting

Business Obligations for Human Rights
Any Progress from Rhetoric to Practice?

While it is generally assumed that large corporations today give rhetorical support for basic human rights in public relations documents, skepticism continues to arise about the behavior of these firms. Do company actions support their rhetoric? This paper provides the initial analysis of our study of both rhetoric and practice regarding human rights in a small sample of large U.S. firms. At this point in the analysis, UNGC membership does not appear to have much influence on corporate rhetoric, but may be partially correlated with several measures of corporate performance on human rights issues.