REMARC UniPi

This edited compilation invites authors involved in empirical research on business, human rights and/or the environment – including research using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches – to reflect on key challenges in the design and implementation of their methodologies.

Book Editors
Ben Grama (Tilburg University), Marisa McVey (Queen’s University Belfast), Samentha Goethals (SKEMA Business School), and Federica Nieri (University of Pisa).

Topic
The field of business, human rights, and the environment – and its unique approaches to governance, norm diffusion, rethinking the role of corporations and other business models in society, the Anthropocene, wicked problems, and considerations of justice – raises unique challenges for empirical research. These include challenges to how we render ‘the corporation’, ‘human rights’ or ‘the environment’ as research objects amenable to empirical research, how we conceptualise matters such as corporate agency, causation, normativity, and power, and how we make decisions over data collection and data analysis methods to produce reliable research findings addressing global issues.

For many researchers embarking on research in this domain, it can be difficult enough to identify all the relevant questions to answer let alone reach the best answers. This volume aims to provide an in-depth exploration of the rich methodological journeys taken in research on business, human rights and the environment, including the choices made regarding theory, ethics, data collection and analysis, and the implications of these choices on the research itself and the field more broadly.
This book is informed by the observation that many researchers tackle the same types of methodological questions, but literature facilitating peer-to-peer learning on these questions is absent. It creates a space where researchers can share their honest reflections on how they made decisions in their overall research approaches and critically reflect on the challenges and limitations of empirical research in the context of empirical research on business, human rights, and the environment.

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