Even though business and human rights (BHR) has become one of the major concepts for discussing businesses’ responsibilities for their societal impacts, its interdisciplinary character and the dominance of previously developed concepts related to business responsibility have made BHR a blurry academic concept, with unclear boundaries, meanings, and implications. The purpose of the paper is to provide conceptual clarity to differentiate it from existing conceptualizations of business responsibility, show that BHR is able to explain better the prominent phenomena that we observe today in terms of business responsibility – such as the division of responsibility for human rights between states and businesses – and argue how it offers a promising conceptual perspective to capture business responsibility in the 21st century. In so doing, we define BHR as a concept for redefining the roles and responsibilities of business and state for human rights, clarify the fundamental assumptions that BHR is based upon as well as outline what BHR explains and what its implications are for a theory of the firm, business purpose, and capitalism. BHR also provides an analysis of governance gaps as well as the roles and responsibilities of state and business; consequently, it provides robust and stringent normative claims about what the purpose of business should be. We conclude with implications for future research.
