Routledge Contemporary Asia Series, 48. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xix, 191 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-70505-9.
This is an ambitious project. It draws on jurisprudence, recent Asian political history, corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature, and political economy. Robert Hanlon argues that although social responsibility is an increasingly important corporate strategy, human rights and corruption remain marginalized CSR issues in China and Southeast Asia for three reasons. First, multinational corporations see the structural causes of human rights violations and corruption as outside their sphere of influence and responsibility. Second, divergent stakeholder interests are sidelining human rights and corruption as CSR issues. Third, pressure to achieve profit maximization is encouraging a “race to the bottom” scenario in which human rights are increasingly ignored. This book concludes that human rights and corruption will remain peripheral business issues until elite stakeholders agree on how these concepts should enter the social responsibility framework while being vigorously promoted as a global best practice (18).
The author admits that he had to scale back his original plan for ten country profiles. This is a pity because whilst the three countries he covers, Cambodia, China, and Thailand, are all interesting and are comprehensively analyzed, a greater coverage of Asian countries might have produced more rounded and generally applicable conclusions. “Asia” after all consists of 48 countries. As it is, the promise of the book’s title “in Asia,” is not really delivered.
I hope it is not churlish or ungenerous to point out that the fieldwork for the book (published April 2014) was carried out between 2007 and January 2010. As someone who has previously tried to juggle a day job and writing a book, I do empathize with Hanlon’s challenge but it means, for example, that there is no reference to the major, on-going anti-corruption campaign in China initiated by Xi Jinping when he became leader in 2012. Certainly, I would have expected Hanlon’s editor to have picked up on infelicities such as ISO 26000 “is set to launch in 2010” (131); and the use of “recent” to describe a report published in 2007.
Nevertheless, the material he does have is well presented, with a logical flow. Each chapter begins with an overview of what is to be covered; discussion; and then a summary recapping the main points of the chapter. The book is an antidote to the sometimes rose-tinted spectacles of business and human rights and CSR advocates. Hanlon raises some important questions about how serious companies doing business in Asia can be about CSR, if they are not including human rights or anti-corruption within their strategies.
However, there are some serious omissions. I double-checked the index to make sure I had not missed a reference to John Ruggie who, as the UN secretary-general’s special representative for business and human rights from 2005, developed a set of principles, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, commonly known as “the Ruggie Principles” (Protect, Respect, Remedy) which have been adopted by multiple international agencies. I would have liked to know Hanlon’s view about whether the Ruggie work will have any impact on business and human rights in Asia. Similarly, it would have been interesting to have Hanlon’s views on the role that Asia’s great religions and philosophical traditions (for example, Confucianism in China) play in shaping Asian attitudes towards how businesses should behave.
In his recommendations for future action, Hanlon emphasizes the role of business schools (as I am currently a business school professor, I, of course, agree!) but there is no acknowledgement of the work of business schools like the Asian Institute of Management and their annual Asian CSR Forum, for example. Similarly, and I believe correctly, the author argues that business representative organizations in Asia should be more proactive—but some recognition of the work of those like the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, which has had a CSR unit for several years, would have strengthened the argument. Hanlon also recommends more engagement from “CSR brokers” but there is barely a mention of the major form of brokerage: corporate responsibility coalitions. Likewise, Hanlon also argues that international NGOs need to engage business more, so some examples like Greenpeace’s campaign on sustainable palm oil and deforestation, which has had a major impact on significant Asian businesses like Asia Pulp & Paper and Golden Agri-Resources, would have added weight to the proposition.
At the end of the book, there is a powerful statement that “scholarship must evolve beyond disciplinary perspectives and more towards holistic research that can incorporate business administration, the humanities, law, and social science. The business case for human rights requires an interdisciplinary approach and will fail if left to narrow theoretical perspectives grounded in specific fields of study” (153). I agree and I hope that the workmanlike contribution that Hanlon has made will inspire others to pursue this evolution. For there is an important book still to be written on corporate responsibility, corruption, and human rights across Asia.
David Grayson
Cranfield University, Cranfield, United Kingdom