Business and Human Rights: Ethical, Legal, and Managerial Perspectives
Florian Wettstein’s Business and Human Rights: Ethical, Legal, and Managerial Perspectives is a timely and ambitious intervention in a field that is still solidifying its contours. Business and Human Rights (BHR) has emerged in recent decades as both a scholarly discipline and a policy arena, spurred by the rise of globalization, corporate power, and mounting evidence of corporate involvement in human rights abuses. This text arrives at a moment when universities are rapidly institutionalizing BHR courses, often at the intersection of law, management, and ethics. Wettstein’s book therefore not only fills a pedagogical gap but also seeks to shape the intellectual and normative foundations of the field.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its breadth and structure. The work includes an impressive arc that begins with foundational philosophical debates (Part I), moves through corporate involvement in rights violations (Part II), develops normative justifications for business responsibilities (Part III), explores accountability and governance mechanisms (Part IV), and finally considers industry-specific case studies and emerging challenges (Part V). Such sequencing mirrors the way students might themselves encounter the field: from history and theory, to problems, to solutions and applications. The introductory chapter, pointedly titled “Learning and Unlearning Business and Human Rights”, sets the tone by destabilizing assumptions about both “human rights” and “business,” situating BHR as more than an extension of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This signals an intellectual seriousness that elevates the book above being a mere manual of compliance or best practices.
Wettstein’s interdisciplinary lens is perhaps the defining quality of the text. Philosophy, international law, management studies, and political science are woven together, ensuring that students from diverse backgrounds can find intellectual entry points. For example, Chapter 3 introduces human rights theory, navigating the tension between relativism and universalism, before connecting those debates to corporate obligations. Later, legal discussions—such as jurisdictional questions in transnational litigation or the complexities of due diligence legislation (Chapter 12)—are made accessible to non-lawyers without diluting rigor. Conversely, management students are pushed beyond “business case” justifications toward deeper ethical commitments. The inclusion of case law, statutes, and international agreements ensures that the book is not merely conceptual but anchored in practice.
The reception of the book has been positive with some scholars emphasizing the didactic value of the book’s ancillary features: grey boxes with short cases, biographical notes, and discussion prompts. These pedagogical devices enhance the book’s utility in classroom settings, offering instructors ready-made tools to stimulate debate. The end-of-chapter study questions and glossary similarly underscore the textbook’s aim to make a complex, often technical field teachable.
Yet the comprehensiveness of the book raises some critical questions. The reliance on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as the “authoritative standard” (Chapter 10) is pragmatic, but it risks reproducing the limitations of the UNGPs themselves. The text does highlight critiques—such as whether the UNGPs rest on “principled pragmatism” that privileges consensus over ambition, or whether enforcement remains too weak—but one might have expected a bolder normative stance from Wettstein, who has elsewhere advocated more expansive corporate obligations. The balance between accessibility and critique is delicate, and while it makes the book widely usable, it may leave advanced readers wanting more radical alternatives.
Similarly, while the industry-specific chapters (Part V) are welcome for their concreteness, they occasionally risk becoming descriptive surveys of “issues and initiatives” rather than analytically probing why particular industries reproduce systemic abuses. The treatment of technology, finance, and apparel rightly foregrounds supply chains, surveillance, and exploitative labor, but structural questions—such as the political economy of neoliberal globalization—could have been more deeply integrated. In this sense, the book’s managerial orientation, while necessary for teaching, sometimes tames its critical edge.
Despite these limitations, Wettstein’s book stands out as the first truly interdisciplinary textbook in BHR. It synthesizes decades of academic debates while equipping readers to navigate real-world dilemmas. For students, it provides clarity in a field marked by fragmentation. For instructors, it offers a flexible text adaptable across law, business, and ethics programs. For practitioners, it lays out the state of the art in both voluntary and mandatory accountability mechanisms. If its cautious pragmatism sometimes underplays more radical critiques, this may be an unavoidable compromise in producing a textbook that seeks to serve multiple audiences.
Business and Human Rights: Ethical, Legal, and Managerial Perspectives is both a map of where the field has been and a guide to where it is heading. By situating business responsibilities within ethical imperatives, legal obligations, and managerial practices, Wettstein provides a comprehensive framework for understanding corporate power in the twenty-first century. Its value lies not only in what it teaches students today but also in how it frames the intellectual agenda for tomorrow. The book deserves to be read not only as a teaching tool but as a substantive contribution to the consolidation of business and human rights as a field of study.
Business and Human Rights: Ethical, Legal, and Managerial Perspectives; Cambridge University Press, March 24, 2022; by Florian Wettstein; pp. 432; Hardcover (ISBN 9781009158381, $123), Paperback (ISBN 9781009158398, $50), eBook (ISBN 9781009177979, $37–47).