Stakeholders without voice: Human rights at work

As part of our continuing series of Human Rights Lectures, we are delighted to welcome Professor Atinuke Adediran, to deliver a lecture that will take us into the world of corporate decision-making to see how boardrooms have become important sites of human rights governance.

The decisions of multinational corporations shape the dignity, economic opportunity, health, and security of workers, consumers, local communities, and others affected by their operations. Yet these stakeholders often lack meaningful opportunities to participate in corporate decision-making, even when they bear its consequences. In the absence of such channels, corporations frequently respond to stakeholder demands through public commitments, disclosures, and statements of corporate values.

During her lecture, Adediran will argue that these responses are primarily managerial rather than structural. They may communicate concern, but they rarely provide affected stakeholders with durable agency or voice. The lecture will therefore explore what legal and governance mechanisms might enable stakeholders to participate meaningfully in corporate decision-making, and how human rights frameworks should respond as corporations acquire greater economic and political power.

Professor Atinuke Adediran is an interdisciplinary scholar and Professor of Law at Fordham University. Her research examines corporations as legal, political and social institutions, with a particular focus on corporate governance, business regulation and social accountability. Drawing on empirical social science methods, computational text analysis, Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models, she explores how corporate policies, governance practices and public commitments influence decision-making on contested social and environmental issues, and the consequences for firms, law, markets and society.

She is the author of Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. She has also published widely in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and Virginia Law Review. Her work has been featured in Bloomberg Law, Fortune, Marketplace and The Wall Street Journal.

Her research has been supported by the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. She has also received Fordham University’s Distinguished Research Award for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Professor Adediran holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University and a JD from Columbia Law School.