Navigating the Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ)
Voltaire Veneracion
3 November 2020
What is a digital journal on BHR by “the oldest publishing house in the world” like?
To find out, I explored the online platform of Cambridge Core’s Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ) on:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-human-rights-journal# [last accessed on 3 November 2020]
BHRJ seeks to be “an authoritative platform for scholarly debate on all issues concerning the intersection of business and human rights in an open, critical and interdisciplinary manner. It seeks to advance the academic discussion on business and human rights as well as promote concern for human rights in business practice.”
The Journal welcomes submissions from both academics and practitioners, such that the former’s peer-reviewed articles appear online and in printed issues alongside the latter’s shorter policy- or case-related essays in the section “Developments in the Field.”
BHRJ also features a Blog “for discussions of themes or events related to human rights, business ethics, and similar topics.” The articles in the latter blog – with much less citations than Journal articles – form part of the multi-disciplinary Cambridge Core Blog and have the tag “Business and Human Rights Journal.” Examples of the latest BHRJ Blog posts are Maysa Zorob’s Quarterly Highlight: Victims’ Rights under the Second Revised Draft Treaty on Business & Human Rights (26 Oct. 2020) and Ruwan Subasinghe’s Uber and Lyft in California: A Case Study on Irresponsible Business Conduct (22 Oct. 2020).
Latest issue
BHRJ’s Editorial Board – led by Editors-in-Chief Surya Deva (City University of Hong Kong School of Law), Anita Ramasastry (University of Washington School of Law, Seattle, USA), Michael Santoro (Santa Clara University, USA), and Florian Wettstein (University of St Gallen, Switzerland) – published online a couple of weeks ago Volume 5, Issue 2 (July 2020) of BHRJ.
This latest issue provides a glimpse of what scholars and practitioners in BHR all over the world are concerned with in 2020, the year COVID-19 forced the world into lockdown, exposing gaps in public health and welfare systems and disrupting businesses. These concerns include: business respect for human rights during a pandemic; analysing Big Data on BHR; and modern slavery.
BHRJ plans to release three issues in 2021. The 2021 institutional price for the current journal with access to a complete run is US$371 (online only: print and bundle have different prices).
For fee articles may also be individually unlocked for a certain period of time. For example, James Cockayne’s Working with the Financial Sector to Correct the Market Failure of Modern Slavery (a Developments in the Field article published online on 22 October 2020 and also listed in the website section’s First View, works that appear on home page’s Featured content section, above other titles) has an Add to Cart price of 23 Euros.
Thankfully, some of the articles are open access: Cambridge Core gives journal writers the option to make their respective studies and essays available for readers’ online viewing or download for free, instead of for a fee.
BHRJ is a text-heavy platform that makes its issues, as well as the articles they contain, available to readers worldwide in PDF format. It could improve by adding interactive multi-media content like images, maps, audio and videos – perhaps of introductions, interviews and Q&As with writers and editors – that supplement printed articles, as well as fora for readers to comment on articles and even interact as a community.
I’ll be reviewing BHRJ articles that are either open access or I had access to below and in subsequent posts.
Big Data
An open access article that likewise appears in Developments in the Field, as well as First View, is Big Data on BHR: Innovative Approaches to Analysing the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre Database. Its authors are Nicole Janz, James Allen-Robertson, Rajeshwari Majumdar, and Shareen Hertel.
In the article, they discuss their development and use of application programming interfaces (APIs) for coding units of data on a Big Data scale from the award-winning and open access database of Business and Human Rights Resource Center.
In the past, the Stories on the BHRRC site – articles on the performance of over 9,000 companies worldwide based on media articles and NGO reports – were difficult to analyse, classify and relate to one another because hand-coding related Stories is complicated and time-consuming.
Then, in early 2018, BHHRC developed an API to efficiently access information on their website. The authors say this was one of the first API initiatives in the human rights field and the first that could be used in the study of BHR.
The API allowed BHHRC users and visitors to retrieve Stories, Companies, Categories (such as region, industry, and human rights issue area), and Components (evidence of Stories such as NGO reports, media articles, lawsuit summaries or company communication to BHRRC).
Recently, innovations of the authors’ research teams based in University of Connecticut, University of Nottingham and University of Essex utilised the API infrastructure to collect data and analyse and visualise Stories on the Big Data scale. They have been able to quickly analyse trends in stakeholder consultation and in industry patterns of specific rights issues:
This allows us to perform systematic analysis of corporate human rights issues on an unprecedented scale. We have downloaded over 50,000 individual stories with roughly 70,000 components such as NGO reports or media articles that are linked to each story. We can now use the ‘Categories’ to map how rights allegations differ within and across industries, show central and peripheral uses, uncover clusters of rights that tend to be violated together, display the strength of relationship between industry activities and rights issues, and examine particular companies’ allegations. We can also learn about NGO and media strategies in reports concerning firms’ human rights abuse, and track where the public focus shifts over time as well as how global regions compare with respect to reporting trends. (p. 5)
While authors’ method of analysing Big Data using API provides an opportunity to confirm whether human rights issues mentioned in anecdotes and single case studies represent a global pattern, they admit that under-reporting remains a challenge because the media articles and NGO reports that BHRRC relies upon may miss certain issues or nuances of reported issues (such as the nature of corporate action and the scope of stakeholders affected).
Underreporting is mitigated by BHHRC’s assignment of researchers around the world who look for stories in different languages. It could further be mitigated by scholars by integrating BHHRC data with data available through APIs provided by other research outlets (such as LexisNexis).
The online article’s PDF features coloured figures showing: 1. A flowchart of information that can be retrieved via the API and 2. Global patterns of human rights issues based on BHRRC Stories. They make the ideas expressed in the article easier to visualise and understand. The figures could be improved by making them larger, so that the text on them becomes legible.
[To be continued]