The “Unipolar Moment” (Mearsheimer, 2019) has passed. It lasted from the fall of the Soviet Union through 2017, and we now live in a multipolar world. The Western language of ethics will persist, and that is good. But in order to remain relevant, business ethicists should begin to develop better multilingual skills when expressing ethical values. This means that multinational Western-domiciled corporations having host county operations in different cultures will need to craft mission, credo, and ethics statements in ways that infuse local cultural values and heritage. It also means that business ethics researchers must become ethically multilingual.

The past of organizations has never been so often under scrutiny and subject of the present conversation than today. Organizations, including businesses, universities, and governments are increasingly confronted with critical questions, concerns, and demands regarding their legacies of irresponsibility, i.e., decisions and actions taken by past generations of managers deemed unethical, immoral, and with enduring negative social and environmental consequences in the present. There is a collection of diverse organizational responses ranging from denial and manipulation, to acknowledgments, apologies, reparations, and the management of the memory of (ir)responsibility. Yet, corporate responses to claims regarding their legacies of irresponsibility has not received much conceptual or theoretical attention. There is no theory on How organizations respond when confronted with their legacies of irresponsibility. The purpose of our paper is to answer that question. We want to uncover key conditions and factors that affect how organizations respond when challenged for actions and decisions taken by past generations of organizational managers. We anticipate that responses may be multiple and equifinal. Thus, we aim to develop a contingent analysis of the various pathways and configurations of organizational responses to legacies of irresponsibility. We explore the case of U.S. universities and their involvement in antebellum slavery and slave trade for our context. We use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the factors and conditions under which organizations respond to their legacies of irresponsibility.

While multi-national businesses have long been implicated in human rights abuses in their supply chains – such as forced labor, physical integrity and sexual abuses - the processes firms use to discover, remedy, and prevent abuses in their operations are still only emerging. The primary objective of this research is to analyze the emergence of new corporate behaviors, specifically the diffusion of corporate human rights policies amongst MNEs. We build a novel “Awareness-Motivation-Capability (AMC)” model to theoretically identify and analyze firm- and industry-level factors that shape a firm’s decision to adopt a human right policy. This paper contributes to empirical research on business and human rights by systematically analyzing corporate adoption of human rights policies at 7,400 global companies from 1999 to 2018, using ASSET4 data. Given the dynamic nature of policy adoption, we employ a Cox proportional hazard model, which enables us to assess whether theoretically motivated factors delay or advance the timing of policy adoption. We find a reactive propensity of corporations to adopt human rights policies; firms respond with human rights policy activity only when the firm itself is involved. This has important implications for policymakers and human rights advocates who insist businesses must conduct due diligence, which instead involves a more proactive business and human rights strategy.

The adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) marked a milestone in shaping the discourse on corporate accountability for human rights. The UNGPs propose that corporations engage in human rights due diligence (HRDD). Scholars have long been evaluating HRDD and its implementation and have raised criticisms of it on conceptual and empirical grounds. We argue that the basis for these criticisms lies in the fact that HRDD is conceptualized and implemented primarily as a management process.This, however, is problematic, because it ultimately jeopardizes the objective of HRDD: to eradicate business-related human rights abuses. The purpose of the paper is to respond to the scholarly call for HRDD implementation that stresses genuine dialogue and prioritizes rightsholders. In so doing, we conceptualize HRDD as an inclusive, sequential, and deliberative process. Understanding HRDD as a deliberative process puts rightsholders front and center, which is in line with the moral foundations of business and human rights. Our deliberative approach to HRDD advocates for a shift towards more inclusive processes that empower affected individuals and communities, ensuring that their voices are heard and – most importantly – that their insights are integrated into the decision-making process.

Management and Organisation scholars have been ignoring the essential role of rural communities in environmental governance within corporate sustainability strategies. Also, the division and specialisation of topics between disciplines have helped to fragment knowledge. To bridge those gaps, we delivered a semi-systematic literature review with an interdisciplinary approach to analyse how different academic disciplines have conceptualised the interactions between enterprises and rural communities in environmental governance. Our preliminary findings suggest that the Business and Economic research area has not addressed the interactions between enterprises and rural communities but has focused on farmers as entrepreneurs. Also, none of the relevant papers were published in Management and Organisation journals. Our results could contribute to an updated overview of what scholars should focus on when devoting our research to the social role of enterprises for the well-being of nature and rural inhabitants. This semi-systematic literature review could add theoretical insights and methodological tools to design new ways for enterprises to contribute to the common good.