Human Rights and the Grammar of Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

This article explores the language of corporate accounts of business and human rights. Using innovative methods drawn from computational corpus linguistics, the article explores discussions of business and human rights in a data set composed of 346 corporate social responsibility reports drawn from firms in extractive industries. The article concludes that human rights are ‘put to work’ in corporate accounts by reconfiguring their meaning to draw them into the ‘familiar frames’ of business accounting narratives.