Carlo Manuel Drauth explores under which conditions multinational enterprises systematically
manage their human rights impacts with a view to preventing corporate human rights violations
across their operations. Using a multi-method research design and focusing on the 30 largest
German firms the author finds that it is neither institutional forces (e.g. standards or
norms) nor stakeholder pressures (e.g. from NGOs or trade unions) alone but their combined
effect that leads to a systematic human rights management at the firm-level. This finding
informs a new theoretical approach to the study of CSR integrating institutional and
stakeholder theories while taking an explicit value chain perspective.
