مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد یکپارچگی پایداری اجتماعی استراتژی شرکت

مقاله سال 2016

 مجله اسکاندیناویایی مدیریت – Scandinavian Journal of Management

In the last decade, around 2000 workers have died in garment factories in Bangladesh alone with the collapse of the garment factory Rana Plaza being the most noticeable example of the dangerous nature of work in garment factories around the globe (Taplin, 2014). Scandals about worker rights have become so common that they now represent the norm, rather than the exception, in the garment industry (cf. Bartley, 2007). These worker rights violations have been facilitated by fragmented and geographical dispersed production in developing countries with some scholars arguing that accidents such as the collapse of Rana Plaza are a logical consequence of companies’ (such as H&M, GAP, Nike and Zara) search for low-cost production in countries with limited public regulation (e.g.,Taplin, 2014).

Garment companies have mainly attempted to tackle worker rights violations in global value chains by creating specific sustainability departments, adopting ethical sourcing policies, investing in factory audits, and publishing sustainability reports. These private regulatory attempts (Bartley, 2007) have though had difficulties translating into improvements at the points of production. For example, Locke, Qin, and Brause (2007) show that of Nike’s 800 evaluated factories almost half of the factories did not improve their compliance over time; 36% actually experienced a decline in compliance, and only approximately 20% improved. Egels-Zandén and Lindholm (2015) similarly showed that, despite state-of-the art auditing, factory conditions only marginally improve over time.

Scholars have also shown that there is a straightforward ruleof-thumb to avoid worker rights violations in global value chains – source from factories in democratic countries with well-developed public regulation (e.g., Distelhorst, Locke, Pal, & Samel, 2015). Garment companies have though been unwilling to restrict where they source from and instead have focused on mitigating the problems through seemingly ineffective private regulation. As Kourula and Delalieux (2015:1) put it, garment companies “CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits” that allow “the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing” to remain intact. This resonates with Davis’ (2005) more general argument about firms’ sustainability activities that he claims to have been too limited, too defensive and too disconnected from corporate strategy.