Transforming How Business Impacts People: Unlocking the Collective Power of Five Distinct Narratives

Narratives are a ubiquitous feature of human life that both shape and are used to explain or validate events, societies and personal or group identities. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a narrative as, “a story or representation used to give an explanatory or justificatory account of a society, period, etc.” Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Schiller is renowned for his development of “narrative economics,” which demonstrates “how popular stories change through time to affect economic outcomes, including not only recessions and depressions, but also other important economic phenomena.”1 Schiller considers the contagion that occurs when narratives go viral, and the power and extent of their resulting impact.

This paper examines the narrative of business and human rights in its relationship to five other established or emerging narratives: the narratives of sustainability, growing inequality, stakeholder capitalism, companies’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, and social and human capital. It considers the opportunity and challenges for the business and human rights narrative to add value to and influence the course of the other narratives, in service of building a new global economy that better protects and respects the most vulnerable people in societies.