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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevance and contradictions of development aid in crafting governance responses for enabling long term social upgrading in global garment value chains. Since governance responses are multilevel, we propose to analyse the interrelation between the global and the local level through the case study of a private regulatory initiative of a new type: the Accord on Fire and Building Security in Bangladesh, operationally run like a development aid programme. We aim at explaining the reasons why it has been banned from operating in the country.

We use the framework of the Global Value Chain (GVC) approach since it is operationally used in development aid and has broadened its focus to investigating the link between economic and social upgrading. It further helps to understand multilevel and multiactor governance responses. Using multiple secondary sources we describe the context in which the Accord emerged, explore its provisions and operations, and analyse the contestation pertaining to its termination. We analyse the Accord both as a global governance tool and a field-level development aid actor that addresses social issues in GVCs.

As an ILO led operational programme, the Accord, since its inception, has proven globally effective at improving workplace safety for many workers. However it has been resented for being hegemonic and, as a governance tool, it has neither succeeded in addressing the flaws of private regulatory initiatives nor changed existing power relationships in GVCs.

The early termination of the Accord has not yet been analysed. In light of this, we propose new insights on the rising role of development aid in private governance responses.

The emergence of global supply chains is closely interlinked with the erosion of the web of rules that used to regulate employment relations for most part of the 20th century. The development of GSCs facilitated the move away from a web to a patchwork of rules in employment relations and the erosion of the same web of rules contributed in turn even further to the dominance at present of GSCs as means of structuring production across the world. Against this context, there is an increasing understanding that the limitations of traditional governance approaches to labour regulation in GSCs at both national and supranational levels should be overcome in order to ensure the effectiveness of labour standards. This chapter critically assesses the regulatory approaches that have been developed in the recent years to tackle the regulation of labour standards in this context. It is argued that there is indeed some evidence of evolution in the regulation of labour standards in GSCs. This can be best described as a move from a state of regulatory vacuum to one that could be characterised as a patchwork of rules, comprising a range of private, state-led and international regulation. However, it it is far from certain whether such experimentation may lead to the emergence of a ‘web of rules’ or even an adequate patchwork of rules that is capable of dealing effectively with the challenges identified in this area.

Working conditions on many digital work platforms often contribute to the grand challenge of establishing decent work. While research has examined the public regulation of platform work and worker resistance, little is known about private regulatory models. In this paper, we document the development of the “Crowdwork Agreement” forged between platforms and a trade union in the relatively young German crowdworking field. We find that existing templates played an important role in the process of negotiating this new institutional infrastructure, despite the radically new work context. While the platforms drew on the corporate social responsibility template of voluntary self-regulation via a code of conduct focusing on procedural aspects of decent platform work (i.e., improving work conditions and processes), the union contributed a traditional social partnership template emphasizing accountability, parity and distributive matters. The trade union’s approach prevailed in terms of accountability and parity mechanisms, while the platforms were able to uphold the mostly procedural character of their template. This compromise is reflected in many formal and informal interactions, themselves characteristic of a social partnership approach. Our study contributes to research on institutional infrastructures in emerging fields and their role in addressing grand challenges.

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.

Corporate elites are increasingly held responsible for issues of sustainability including working conditions and workers’ rights in global production networks. We still know relatively little about how they respond to concrete stakeholder initiatives aiming to restrict corporate voluntarism through transnational regulation. In this paper we report comparative findings on corporate legitimation strategies in response to requests by labor representatives to sign Global Framework Agreements (GFAs). These agreements are intended to hold multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for the implementation of core labor standards across their supply chains. We propose to broaden management-focused analyses of corporate legitimation strategies by applying a field-oriented perspective that considers the embeddedness of management in a broader web of strategic activity and variable opportunity structures. Our findings suggest that legitimation strategies are developed dynamically along with the rules, positions, and understandings developing around specific regulatory issues in sequences of interactions between elites and challenging groups.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of crossvergence from international human resource management (IHRM) as a conceptual lens for understanding and analyzing the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms in global production networks (GPNs). The crossvergence perspective can particularly contribute to understanding how the agency of suppliers is influenced by the interaction of global–local dynamics.

The paper illustrates how the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices can be understood as a process of crossvergence. Subsequently, it reviews and structures insights from GPN and IHRM literature to detail the process.

The paper underscores the complicated role of suppliers in ensuring decent work in GPNs. Suppliers face a multitude of global and local interacting, and partially conflicting, demands. They process these demands as active agents and need to develop suitable employment practices in response.

The paper supports the nascent discourse on supplier agency in forming socially responsible employment practices. It connects different streams of literature to illuminate the perspective of suppliers, introduces IHRM insights to the debate and offers conceptual guidance for analyzing interacting global and local pressures on suppliers.

Private certification systems (PCS) have emerged as governance tools for sustainable development, regulating social and environmental standards through global supply chains. PCS are seen as essentially private and market-driven, but governments have engaged with them in various ways. There are also substantial differences in the institutional design of PCS with regard to the standard-setting process, ex-ante conformity assessment and ex-post verification procedures. Consequently, what determines the institutional design of PCS has attracted growing attention. This article argues that governments, through public regulation, influence the design of PCS, which in turn affects their effectiveness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, a review of academic literature, policy and legal documents presents how PCS have become institutionalized in government policy, focusing on sustainable public procurement (SPP) regulation. Second, the authors explore the link between effectiveness and the institutional design of PCS by empirically assessing the variations between institutional parameters conducive to effectiveness. Data from the Ecolabel Index database were used to assess the presence or absence of four institutional design parameters related to the rule-making and monitoring mechanisms of PCS.

Public procurement regulations are important drivers influencing the institutional design of PCS. The buying power and market share of government spending is a potential tool for policy-makers not only to stimulate the adoption of PCS, but also for shaping their design and effectiveness. However, the impact of such policies is highly dependent upon the market-share of public procurement within a given sector. In addition to public procurement frameworks, other factors drive the institutional evolution of PCS.

The article connects two themes within the study of non-state market regulation; the growing interaction of governments with PCS, and the institutional variety and development of these systems.

The purpose of this study is to review the development of the socially sustainable supply chain management field.

The 112 most cited papers in the field until 2017 are analysed using a state-of-the-art structured literature review model borrowed from the accounting field.

This study highlights the increasing number of publications across the years, the diversity of journals and the type of authors addressing the topic. It reveals that qualitative studies focused on large companies in the garment, food and electronics sectors and on private regulations capture most of the attention, with Asia, Europe and North America being the most scrutinised locations. Drivers and barriers for socially sustainable supply chain management are summarised, clustered and confronted. This study also evaluates how the sustainability and corporate social responsibility concepts are used in the above field and analyses the existing definitions of social sustainability.

This study incites researchers to broaden their studies to diverse sectors and locations, addressing different levels of supply chains with quantitative techniques and clearer conceptual foundations.

This study incites practitioners to further contribute to this scholars-dominated research field, offering their practical insights and perspectives.

This study offers original insights and critiques of the literature, highlighting its gaps and proposing new research avenues for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the functioning of the French Law No 2017-399 relating to the duty of vigilance of parent companies and ordering companies, a law defended by labor unions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as an answer to the ineffectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms of multi-national corporation.

The authors try to determine to what extent the new mechanisms brought by this law could improve or not the failure of existing CSR mechanisms.

The authors find out that internal weaknesses of the law, which is based on voluntary CSR instruments and without penalties, internal mechanisms of the French judicial system or external economic factors, might considerably limit the effectiveness of the law.

Even if for the first time, French judges might be asked to evaluate the reasonableness of the CSR practices of firms, one of the paradoxical effects of this law might be to institutionalize soft law mechanisms such as CSR certification or reporting, the proponents of this law precisely wanted to get rid of at the origin.