Quick Take

How to Advance Human Rights in Business School Education

September 24, 2024

Earlier this month, the Business and Human Rights Scholars Association and the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum organized a conference at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The event is the annual gathering of the academic BHR community and this year, it brought together over 100 BHR scholars and instructors from around the world to discuss emerging academic research and teaching methods.

One session that I co-organized was dedicated to strategies for advancing human rights in business school education. We framed the session as preparation for our annual Global Business School Network (GBSN) Impact Community for Business and Human Rights meeting on Nov. 25, 2024. About 30 participants brainstormed on the following strategies to institutionalize human rights in business schools:

Developing locally relevant teaching material

To promote human rights, especially in places where governments are unable or unwilling to protect them, we need to support the development of teaching tools that address challenges in particular regions. The model for this approach was tested last year at Qatar University, where a group of professors worked with Michael Posner, director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and the ILO to develop a series of teaching cases. Qatar University now plans to serve as the regional BHR hub for other universities in the Middle East.

A similar model for Asia will be discussed at the United Nations Responsible Business and Human Rights Forum in Bangkok at the end of September, and for South America at the GBSN Beyond conference in Bogota in November.

Together with the ILO and GBSN, NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights also developed customizable teaching resource packages on decent labor in the fishing industry and labor migration.
Integrating human rights in existing management courses

Anchoring a human rights perspective in management education requires integrating the topic into courses that are taught routinely at business schools. While courses on sustainability or business ethics might touch on human rights, they are often more focused on environmental sustainability. Typically, these are elective rather than required courses and when human rights topics are raised, they generally do not address the need for companies to change their own business models. Therefore, a better approach will be to integrate human rights issues into required courses in finance, marketing, and accounting.

In the GBSN network, the research cluster on “human rights in accounting” under the leadership of John Ferguson and Yingru Li has developed methods for this integration in the accounting discipline.
Activating the private sector to speak up for human rights

Business leaders who commit to human rights in their own operations should also demand that business schools teach the skills necessary for managing human rights in corporate practice.

A natural partner for us for this strategy would be the UN Global Compact (UNGC), whose participating companies are already committed to responsible management principles. The Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) is a sister organization of the UNGC. NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights We has been co-leading the PRME working group on business and human rights since 2021.

Anyone who works at a business school or teaches business students can participate in the GBSN Impact Community . Please join us at the annual GBSN meeting on November 25 and don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions!