Business and Human Rights (BHR) has grown dramatically as a field in the past several decades. BHR can be understood as having developed out of a crisis: increasing cases of human rights violations with a nexus to business strategy resulted in a search for mechanisms to remedy existing harms and avoid future harms. As an academic field, BHR has grown dramatically, with dedicated journals, scholarly association, and an annual forum at the United Nations that draws more than 3,000 people. However, BHR is at a crossroads, as work done in legal and management scholarship has not led to the kinds of transformations of business practices and strategies that have long been hoped for. In this inaugural session for the Telfer Pilot Knowledge Mobilization Initiative, Harry Van Buren will first provide an overview of the BHR field and some reflections on how it might enhance its impact in the most respect: preventing future human rights violations with a nexus to business and remediating those that have already occurred. Following this opening overview and reflection, participants will be invited to think about how knowledge from their respective fields might intersect with BHR to produce actionable knowledge in this domain.
About the Speaker
Harry Van Burenis the Z. Lupton Patten Endowed Chair of Business Ethics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business as well as an honorary professor at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. His doctorate in business environment, ethics and public policy is from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business. He has published more than 70 articles in outlets such as the Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Industrial Relations. His current research interests include business and human rights, preventing human trafficking in global supply chains, business and peace, relational stakeholder theory, and employment ethics. He is the inaugural editor of the business and human rights section of the Journal of Business Ethics, having previously co-edited both the human resource management and religion sections at that journal. He has held leadership positions in the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management and the International Association for Business & Society. He has co-edited a book on business and human rights to be published by Edward Elgar in January 2025 and also will have a forthcoming book on structural injustice and business ethics published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2025.
