The early 1990s saw the injection of the issue of human rights and business into the global public consciousness. While the notion of corporate social responsibility has been around since the 1970s, never before have we witnessed such as focus on the integration of these two constructs by multiple stakeholders, scholars, and practitioners alike. Recent human resource (HR) scholarship has called for greater focus on social responsibility (Fenwick and Bierema 2008). Similarly, business scholarship has acknowledged that the topic of human rights in management knowledge and practice is limited. At a recent UN Global Compact US network
Forum on Public Policy
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meeting in April 2008, Mike Toffel, Harvard Business School Professor argued: “The topic of human rights is new to business scholarship. Although there are peripheral mentions of human rights, there is still plenty of room for management knowledge and practice to work on the implementation of human rights” (see UNGC meeting from April, 2008)