Bringing political context back into international business studies of human rights

In this article, we respond to Giuliani, Santangelo, and Wettstein’s (2016) call formore international business (IB) research on the theme of human rights (HR).While we surely agree with the need for increasing research on the topic, we arguethat future research should emphasize and elaborate on the role of political context. Moving the spotlight from states to companies as HR violators runs the risk of undermining the contextual complexities where violations take place. Companies are deeply embedded in their interaction with a variety of different stakeholders, including public sector and civil society organizations as well as other firms. We see that HR scholars can gain insights from the blooming literature of political corporate social responsibility (CSR) to bring back political context (Frynas &Stephens, 2015; Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011; Scherer,Rasche, Palazzo, & Spicer, 2016; Schremp-Stirling, 2016). HR research can be seen as a more empirically driven project and thus a political theory grounding can offer a solid foundation for this important stream of scholarship.