Civil Resistance and Corporate Behavior:
Aug 12, 2016
Corporations can be implicated in human rights violations involving their employees and the communities in which they operate. Although corporations function within a framework of national and international human rights norms, such as the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights—and several industries have self-regulated, promoting sector-specific standards—corporations may be most responsive not to top-down standards or enforcement, but to citizen-led resistance. What sorts of civil resistance are most effective in gaining concessions and from which corporations? What corporate characteristics—such as sector, market share, reputational value, or leadership changes—and contextual factors, like rule of law, influence the likelihood that corporations will make concessions? In this paper, a University of Denver (DU) research team constructed a new dataset to answer these questions, gathering observational data in Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa.