Human Rights and the Grammar of Corporate Social Responsibility
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918819400 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(5) 625–649
Human Rights and the
ª The Author(s) 2019
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Grammar of Corporate
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918819400
Social Responsibility
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Ciara´n O’Kelly
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
This article explores the language of corporate accounts of business and human rights.
Using innovative methods drawn from computational corpus linguistics, the article
explores discussions of business and human rights in a data set composed of 346 cor-
porate social responsibility reports drawn from firms in extractive industries. The article
concludes that human rights are ‘put to work’ in corporate accounts by reconfiguring
their meaning to draw them into the ‘familiar frames’ of business accounting narratives.
Keywords
Boilerplate, business and human rights, corporate social responsibility, corpus linguistics,
narrative accounts
Introduction
This article is about how human rights are put to work in business accounts. Business and
human rights scholars mostly focus on how rights might be governed within business
contexts, how breaches might be prevented and, where they occur, how business
accountability ought to be achieved. Bernaz, for instance, describes the study of business
and human rights as being ‘about how business may negatively impact human rights and
the various ways in which such violations can be prevented and addressed, including
how business can be held accountable’ (2016: 3). But businesses do not simply receive
the rights to which they are subject. They actively construct the environment within
which rights work and shape that environment towards more manageable and, where
Corresponding author:
Ciara´n O’Kelly, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.
Email: c.okelly@qub.ac.uk
626
Social & Legal Studies 28(5)
possible, towards friendlier ends. In this article, I discuss how global extraction firms put
rights ‘to work’ within their social responsibility discourses.
I am interested especially in the dual character of rights within these narratives. Rights
are presented by corporations as playing a uniquely legal role in the context of social
responsibility. They are also presented within familiar corporate governance narratives
of risk. Business and human rights norms, as articulated in United Nations and other
instruments (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2011;
United Nations, 2011), are spoken back to society as something akin to accounting rules,
best responded to in the routine language of business accounts. One view of this would
suggest that human rights are shorn of their transformative promise. A more optimistic
perspective would be that this is business and human rights working as intended, deli-
vering human rights in an active collaboration between business and policymakers.
Either way, the language used around business and human rights is a ripe focus for
study, not least regarding the limitations that these collaborations produce.
I take an innovative approach to analysing and visualizing corporate speech by
applying computational corpus linguistics techniques to a data set of 346 corporate social
responsibility (CSR) reports published by 36 global mining and energy firms between
1998 and 2017.1 This corpus, composed of just over 13 million words, gives us ample
space to examine the linguistic routines that have developed around business and human
rights in corporate accounts.
Corpus linguistics involves the study of language as represented in large bodies of
texts. A corpus linguistics approach involves empirical analysis of large collections of
texts (the ‘corpus’), often utilizing computers and applying both quantitative and qua-
litative techniques (Biber et al., 1998: 4). While its interaction with linguistic theory
varies, this ‘taming’ of textual data (Pollach, 2012) is a key feature of the practice.
Business narratives are not simply a medium for communicating ideas, they are
attempts to ‘control things with words’ (Czarniawska and Gagliardi, 2003; Czarniawska
Joerges and Joerges, 1988; White, 1987). In the discussion subsequently I suggest some
ways in which these data might be compiled and visualized, so we better might under-
stand how rights are put to work. Social responsibility reports bring sense-making and
storytelling processes to bear on governance structures and routines (Meyer and Rowan,
1977; Suddaby et al., 2010).
I focus primarily on boilerplate: on repetitive linguistic routines that recur endlessly
in CSR reports. Corporate responsibility boilerplate is not simply banal. It can be read as
‘lexical priming’, aimed at ‘harmonising thinking’, in this case, between those internal
registers and social norms, through the act of repetition itself (Hoey, 2005: 182). The
uses to which human rights are put in corporate accounts and the contexts in which they
are set are essentially creative. They aim at finding forms of speaking that can situate
business conduct without disrupting business operations.
The extraction and energy sectors seem most appropriate for this study in large part
because of their relationship with the physical environment and the monumental
impact they have. Their displacing of populations, sculpting of landscapes and pollut-
ing of the atmosphere render extraction and energy firms ‘prone to be objects of social
activism and critique’ (Jaworska, 2018: 195). They interact with questions ranging
from humanity’s cultural heritage (for instance, Bainton et al., 2011; van Doorn, 2016),
O’Kelly
627
through the manufacturing of communities (Rajak, 2011) to social licenses to operate
(Gunningham et al., 2004; Owen and Kemp, 2013; Wheeler, 2015). There is thus ‘a
stronger need for them to justify their stance on sustainability’ (Jaworska, 2018: 195)
compared to other sectors.
Other sectors, finance for instance, where funding of infrastructural projects has
raised similar issues and discourses (see, for instance, Conley and Williams, 2011;
Wo¨rsdo¨rfer, 2015), present possibilities for parallel analyses. The strong focus on human
rights in the extraction sectors allows us to explore the method in a relatively clear
manner however. The relatively narrow choice of sector here, at the same time, allows
us to focus on the method rather than, say, on differing constructions of audience
between the firms sampled here and post-financial crisis banks.
The study of collocations (Barnbrook et al., 2013; Sinclair, 1991) involves inquiry
into how words develop their meaning in the company of other words and phrases.
Patterns of ‘cohesion’ (Mahlberg, 2006) and ‘keyness’ (Bondi and Scott, 2010) that
develop in this context are crucial to the analysis in the following. While the examination
of business texts using corpus linguistic techniques has some history in the study of
communication (e.g. Jaworska, 2018; Lischinsky, 2011; Rutherford, 2005), the idea of a
‘corpus-based Computer-Assisted Legal Linguistics’ is only now beginning to emerge
(Hamann and Vogel, 2018: 1473).2 Businesses articulate themselves through human
rights, not in terms of instrumental questions of compliance, but by constructing human
rights within a business context. Corpus linguistics helps us engage with that. If we are to
understand business and human rights, then such a constructivist approach is more than
warranted: It is essential.
This article is organized into three parts. In the next section, I discuss the interactions
of narratives, legitimacy and agency with corporate reporting. Then, I present a brief
account of the method applied to the corporate reports. From there, I discuss the way
corporate human rights discourses focus both on regulatory instruments and on the
familiar ‘risk frames’ of corporate accounting routines.
Narrative and Legitimacy
Business narratives around human rights show businesses telling us that their values are
‘congruent with the prevailing values of the total society’ (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975:
131). Scepticism about corporate claims to virtue is no doubt reasonable. Corporate
speech is nonetheless worthy of study as a kind of action bringing itself to bear upon
the world. Human rights are put to work to control both organizational conduct and
social perceptions about that conduct (Czarniawska Joerges and Joerges, 1988). Rights
are especially pertinent in such speech for three reasons. The impact of corporate con-
duct on people’s lives and the ways in which that conduct is often pursued with state
support, especially in extraction industries, has placed global corporate complicity with
rights violations directly in the sights of NGOs and home state governments. From there,
second, the language of human rights resonates with publics that can influence those who
might bring themselves to bear on corporate conduct and so is likely to attract the
attention of various publics at large.
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Social & Legal Studies 28(5)
Just as important as conduct on the ground and normative congruence in home
countries, third, the rhetoric of ‘respect for human rights’ can be presented as adherence
to ‘standards’ and so can act as a bridge between normative claims and the traditional
accounting rhetoric through which firms are managed. Human rights standards do not
simply suggest adherence to norms. They can also be allied in one direction to an idea of
legal standards and in the other to the rhetorics and accounts through which manage-
ments govern their firms (Edelman and Suchman, 1997; Edelman et al.,...
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