Transforming Business: Aligning Profits with Human Rights

Societal expectations of business have shifted significantly in recent decades. While shareholder value remains the central driver of corporate decision-making, companies now face growing demands to account for how they generate profit – demands that are increasingly backed by law. This book argues that the most effective response is not procedural compliance but genuine business model transformation: embedding respect for human rights into the architecture of how companies operate, not as an add-on but as a way of doing business.

Drawing on original field research across the extractive, agricultural, and apparel sectors, the book documents companies that have done exactly that – generating tangible, positive outcomes for workers and communities while sustaining commercial success. Each case is examined in depth, including its strengths, limitations, and the barriers encountered along the way. The concluding chapters distil five core components of a Transformation Formula that illustrates how business model transformation can be measured and replicated at scale.

Written for a broad audience, including business executives and sustainability professionals seeking evidence-based models for implementing human rights due diligence, lawyers and consultants advising companies on responsible business conduct, policymakers and regulators shaping the frameworks within which business operates, and students and researchers engaging with business and human rights as both a field and a practical strategy, this book provides proof of concept that aligning profits with human rights is not only desirable but achievable.

Dorothée Baumann-Pauly is Director of the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights and Professor at the Geneva School of Economics and Management at the University of Geneva. She is also the Research Director at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

Justine Nolan is Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute and Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Andy Symington is a business and human rights specialist focused on social performance, human rights, and just transition in the mining industry and in renewable energy supply chains.