Multiplicity, the corporation and human rights in global value chains
| Author | Christian Scheper |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098495 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221098495
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(3) 329 –347
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367221098495
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Multiplicity, the corporation
and human rights in global
value chains
Christian Scheper
Abstract
Human rights in global value chains have become a key field of study in international law and
corporate governance. The analysis often starts with a gap – a ‘governance gap’ in human rights
protection. This pragmatic starting point calls for pragmatic solutions: better corporate compliance
and more accountability. While this goes a long way in addressing corporate misconduct, the
global corporate form, its power and legitimation in transnationally generating and appropriating
value tend to become naturalized phenomena. Moreover, the effects of accountability agendas
on corporate power and legitimation are hardly considered. Instead, I propose to address the
‘human rights problem’ by understanding the corporation and its networks as consequences
of international politics – conceptualized as inter-societal multiplicity. The multiplicity lens
offers a possibility to replace the governance gap with a productive conception of inter-societal
conditions and can complement the focus on accountability and compliance. I conclude the article
by tentatively sketching three important consequences of such a starting point for defining the
problem of human rights in global value chains: the international dimensions of the division of
labour under competitive conditions, the legitimation of corporate practices and the production
of knowledge for their regulation.
Keywords
business and human rights, corporate power, global production, governance theory,
international law, international politics
Introduction
From international law to economic sociology, management studies and business ethics,
the debate on business and human rights has become a prominent field of study. ‘Human
rights in global value chains (GVCs)’ is one of its key problem areas (Buhmann et al.,
2019). Surprisingly, the debate is less prominent in the field of politics and International
Relations (IR), with some exceptions that I will mention below. This is somewhat
startling, since such important academic and international policy influences in this area
Corresponding author:
Christian Scheper, University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstr. 53, Duisburg 47057, Germany.
Email: christian.scheper@uni-due.de
1098495CAC0010.1177/00108367221098495Cooperation and ConflictScheper
research-article2022
Article
330Cooperation and Conflict 57(3)
come from John Ruggie (2014, 2017), who is one of the most prominent IR scholars. At
first glance, however, it may seem that IR as a discipline does not have much to contrib-
ute, since relationships between rights and corporations are genuine subjects of other
disciplines. GVCs are also more central to socioeconomics and human geography.
We might question whether the discipline of IR is even capable of contributing to this
debate. Has it not too systematically left private economic entities and the formation of
global flows of goods to other disciplines, such as economics, sociology and geography?
The core of the IR discipline has side-lined global production (Van der Pijl, 2015).
Of course, heterodox approaches to international political economy (IPE) have exten-
sively studied the power and agency of transnational corporations (Cutler, 2003; Fuchs,
2013; Strange, 1994). But it can be stated that heterodox IPE has often suspended ethical
or normative questions related to liberal international human rights law as well as analy-
ses of transnational corporate agency therein (Noelke and May, 2018). This does not
mean, of course, that some streams of critical IPE have not explored the productive
power of private corporations in relation to ethical and normative discourses more gener-
ally. This includes, in particular, feminist work (Prügl, 2015) and studies in cultural polit-
ical economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013). But the insights we can draw from this research
on the currently dynamic relationship between international human rights institutions,
private companies and their production networks have so far hardly been incorporated
into the dominant policy discourse on ‘business and human rights’. The bottom line,
therefore, is that the relationship that exists between transnational corporations and the
contemporary human rights discourse has been elaborated only to an unsatisfactory
degree in existing research.
As a result, a problem persists in the current policy-oriented debate on ‘business and
human rights’: it starts from the perception of gaps – ‘governance gaps’ (OHCHR, 2008:
3) that prevent an effective protection of human rights from transnational corporate mis-
conduct. Constitutive political processes that lead to the miserable human condition of
global production are barely addressed. Essentially, they are only considered by noting
that there is a too permissive environment for corporations (OHCHR, 2008: 3). Thus, to
close those gaps and make the environment less permissive, policy strategies focus on
more corporate respect for human rights and better forms of corporate accountability.
This diagnosis and treatment of governance gaps, while not wrong, naturalizes the cor-
porate form, its vast transnational networks, its practices of value creation (or appropria-
tion) and of legitimation. The solution targets the permissive environment, as if simply
the absence of an authority had created the problem, rather than the very specific inter-
national form and reach of the corporation, its practices, values and powers. To be clear,
there is nothing wrong with the goals of better norm compliance and accountability.
Quite to the contrary, the dominant pragmatic approach, most prominently represented
by the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (OHCHR,
2011), has led to remarkable progress towards recognizing human rights predicaments in
transnational enterprises, including GVCs. But some important facets of the debate and
consequences of its dominant problem definition are largely left out, such as the corpo-
rate form (Baars, 2019), corporate power (Birchall, 2021) and legitimation (Scheper,
2019) in the human rights field.
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