Business and Human Rights as Sensemaking: A Multi-Level Framework for Organizational Translation

Business and human rights (BHR) scholarship calls for research into how human rights are understood and translated within organizations. In contrast to the dominant single-actor approach to translation scholarship, this article adopts a multi-level narrative approach to explore how work-floor employees, operational managers, and senior managers interpret human rights. Based on interviews in the British hospitality sector, we identify three distinct narratives: “local discrimination and inequality”; “severe foreign harms and ethical compliance”; and “external issues and legal compliance.” These narratives reveal the divergent interpretations of human rights across organizational levels. Building on these narratives, we develop and apply a “BHR as sensemaking” framework that shows the embodied, emotional, and cognitive sources of meaning underpinning these narratives. Our findings underscore the importance of adopting a multi-level integrative approach to BHR translation that recognizes organizational actors’ diverse sources of meaning and knowledge shaping human rights responsibility in practice.