1st March 2016
Book review of CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN ASIA | By Robert J. Hanlon
This is an ambitious project. It draws on jurisprudence, recent Asian political history, corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature, and political economy. Robert Hanlon argues that although social responsibility is an increasingly important corporate strategy, human rights and corruption remain marginalized CSR issues in China and Southeast Asia for three reasons. First, multinational corporations see the structural causes of human rights violations and corruption as outside their sphere of influence and responsibility. Second, divergent stakeholder interests are sidelining human rights and corruption as CSR issues. Third, pressure to achieve profit maximization is encouraging a “race to the bottom” scenario in which human rights are increasingly ignored. This book concludes that human rights and corruption will remain peripheral business issues until elite stakeholders agree on how these concepts should enter the social responsibility framework while being vigorously promoted as a global best practice
