A Research Agenda for Business and Human Rights offers a rigorous exploration of the multi-participatory and multi-disciplinary character of the Business and Human Rights (BHR) field. By bringing together the insights of multiple scholars, the book highlights the interconnectedness of law, management and activism in addressing ongoing debates on business ethics, corporate accountability and human rights. The structure and theme of the book reflect a common understanding within BHR scholarship: that effective discourse must acknowledge the contributions and impacts of a wide range of stakeholders, moving beyond the state-centrism of traditional international law. It conveys an important message for the evolution of the BHR field: the need to move past the state–corporate focus of the UN Guiding Principles on BHR and towards a genuinely dialogical framework. At its core, this approach would foster the democratic participation of rights-holders in the BHR decision-making, in the evaluation of outcomes and in the design of corrective measures.

The three parts of the book illustrate the different dimensions of stakeholder interaction in shaping the BHR agenda:

Part I’s contributions underscore the vulnerability of historically marginalised groups, a condition rooted in either the absence of effective legislation or the prevalence of corporate-centric rather than human rights-centric regulatory regimes. These chapters underline a central message: rights protection in business cannot be secured through state regulation or corporate voluntarism alone. What emerges is not just a critique of existing governance gaps, but a call to reimagine BHR as a dialogical practice in which those most affected are active contributors to norm-setting, enforcement, and remedy.

The chapters in this section speak to the breadth of human rights topics in the law and management literatures. Goethals’ chapter highlights how refugees’ structural exclusion from formal labour markets renders them particularly vulnerable to exploitation within global supply chains, especially given the failure of corporate-led governance mechanisms to provide effective protection. Rehbein, Snelson-Powell and Westermann-Behaylo look at coercive workplace practices and the patriarchal norms that render women workers more vulnerable to managerial abuse than their male counterparts. Knudsen, Moon and Rahman extend this discussion by exploring how worker-empowerment initiatives in Bangladesh’s garment sector can serve as bottom-up responses to structural inequalities. The section as a whole points to a wider shift towards participatory recognition, challenging the prevailing state-centric (law literature) and focal firm-centric (management literature) model of BHR governance and pushes us to imagine frameworks that are shaped from the ground up, with the lived experiences of marginalised workers at the centre.

Reinforcing the book’s central argument for a participatory approach to BHR, Part II examines the challenges that the bottom-up perspective introduced in Part I faces when confronted with complex contextual and institutional realities. It underscores the book’s core message: effective BHR interventions depend on genuine participation by affected communities, sensitivity to local contexts and mechanisms that tackle structural power imbalances, rather than relying solely on top-down, corporate- or state-driven strategies.

Rettberg’s Colombian case study illustrates the potential of businesses to support peacebuilding through collaboration with local communities. By framing communities as agents, Rettberg repositions corporations from external stabilisers to participants to argue that reciprocal relationships must be nurtured for lasting peace. The role of the corporation at state level is also explored by Bernal-Bermúdez and Sánchez, who illustrate how corporate-led initiatives can privilege companies’ economic interests over the priorities of local communities. Expanding the scope further, Grant and Twyford explore the state’s broader role through their analysis of major sporting events, whose scale often conceals human rights abuses. These chapters together underscore that without addressing underlying power asymmetries, business interventions, even well-intentioned ones, cannot meaningfully contribute to community-driven development or sustainable peace.

The finance industry presents a different, yet equally complex, arena for participatory human rights engagement. Giuliani, Macchi, Nieri and Morreale provide valuable clarity by mapping banks’ involvement in human rights violations, distinguishing between ‘directly causing’ harm and ‘being linked’ through business relationships. Schilling highlights the growing role of investors in enhancing corporate human rights performance, arguing for an investor-specific human rights due diligence duty. These contributions underscore that even indirect involvement carries responsibility when banks and investors fail to exercise due diligence.

Part III shifts the discussion from normative frameworks to the practical challenges of implementing BHR standards within corporate structures. The section emphasises how language, accounting, and managerial practices both reflect and shape the limits of corporate engagement with human rights.

Hopkins, O’Kelly, and Hackett open this analysis by exposing the contradictions inherent in corporate discourse. Their work demonstrates how companies simultaneously frame their human rights impacts as risks to others, aligning with the outward-facing logic of human rights due diligence, while interpreting remedy claims as existential threats to themselves. This form of ‘code shifting’ undermines meaningful commitments, reducing them to promises that corporations resist translating into actionable obligations for fear of liability. Building on this critique, Obara explores the internal dimension of these contradictions, focusing on the gap between what companies communicate externally and how they operationalise human rights internally. She highlights the need for closer scrutiny of how corporate structures actually engage with rights: how they interpret the concept itself, measure impacts on rights-holders and respond to due diligence requirements.

McPhail and Ferguson extend this inquiry into the realm of accounting, tracing the pressure on corporate reporting practices to expand beyond financial performance to include social and environmental impacts. For the authors, the solution lies not merely in technical adjustments but in democratising the development of human rights measurement itself; an approach that centres rights-holders and draws upon emerging theoretical frameworks on recognition and inequality. Karmel rounds off the section by arguing that corporations require dedicated institutional structures to internalise human rights considerations, distinguishing them from traditional risk management approaches. Effective mitigation often depends on situating corporate activity within its broader socio-economic context, where supply chain dynamics amplify vulnerabilities. In this light, grievance mechanisms emerge not simply as legal obligations but as crucial managerial tools, although, as Karmel notes, they remain far from standard practice.

Part IV turns from current challenges to the contested visions for the future evolution of the BHR field. Here, the focus shifts towards transformative proposals that seek to reconfigure both corporate responsibility and the architecture of governance.

Wettstein frames the debate by rejecting two dominant approaches: the corporate-centred managerial model and the emerging compliance-driven model centred on mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD). Wettstein calls for a rights-holder-oriented economy, in which respect for rights is not a constraint on profit-making but a prerequisite for it. The challenges of achieving this vision in emerging economies are vividly illustrated by Srinivasan’s case study of India, where codes of conduct adopted by multinationals often fail to translate into substantive changes. Deva advances a solution to this, which takes Wettstein’s rights-holder-centrism one more step, proposing an alternative HRDD model in which rights-holders themselves conduct the due diligence process. This approach directly addresses the limitations identified in earlier chapters, countering corporate-centred rhetoric by placing power in the hands of those most affected.

Placing the needs and perspectives of rights-holders at the centre of BHR is the book’s prevailing argument—what the editors refer to as the ‘situatedness of the individual’ in their concluding remarks. At the same time, both the diverse environments in which corporations operate and the types of business they engage in add further layers of complexity to BHR implementation. For HRDD to be genuinely effective, corporate internal structures must be able to adapt and account for the varied contexts and different business models. Managers should recognise that corporations of the future are expected not only to comply with the law, but also to internalise and embed BHR principles within their organisational culture. Ultimately, if BHR’s collective contribution can be crystallised into one core idea, it is this: a sustainable future relies on an economy centred on the rights-holder.

A Research Agenda for Business and Human Rights offers wide-ranging motivations for advancing research on BHR across disciplines. Given that, particularly in the management sphere, research on BHR remains in its infancy, there are ample examples here of the kind of approaches needed, impactful settings in which to undertake research, and a literature upon which to build. This is a sound basis for scholarship on how to address human rights issues, which can contribute both to developing academic knowledge and steering practice.