DAX-Firms and Human Rights: Understanding Institutional and Stakeholder Pressures along the Value Chain

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.