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The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) sustainable compact is evident for many labor-intensive industries in emerging economies. This study aims to develop a sustainable human resource (HR) practice model for a labor-intensive industry from the evidence of the Bangladeshi ready-made garments (RMG) sector.

The study tests the factors identified from the literature for model validation. A total of 22 HR function items were used in a survey of 800 randomly selected respondents from the RMG sector in Bangladesh. The factor analysis (both exploratory and confirmatory) techniques were applied to explore and validate the model.

The study findings reveal that the factory management and policymakers should focus on sustainable HR practices for the betterment of a labor-intensive industry. In detail, the staffing function involves strategic HR planning, recruitment and selection and perfect employee placement; training and development functions entail proper organizational orientation, various training and development programs and employees’ career management and growth; the motivation function necessitates job design, fairness in the appraisal, practicing good organizational citizenship behavior with sound rewarding system and compensation packages; and finally, the maintenance function entails healthy and safe working environment, good communication and relationship management.

The study is original in developing a sustainable HR practice model with the alignment of ILO’s three inter-linked sustainability compact for a labor-intensive industry from an emerging economy perspective. The study’s outcomes will be a torchbearer for any labor-intensive industry’s sustainable HR practice from an emerging economy across the globe.

In nano-scale-based very large scale integration technology, quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is considered as a strong and capable technology to replace the well-known complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology. In QCA technique, rotated majority gate (RMG) design is not explored greatly, and therefore, its advantages compared to original majority gate are unnoticed. This paper aims to provide a thorough observation at RMG gate with its capability to build robust circuits.

This paper presents a new methodology for structuring reliable 2n-bit full adder (FA) circuit design in QCA utilizing RMG. Mathematical proof is provided for RMG gate structure. A new 1-bit FA circuit design is projected here, which is constructed with RMG gate and clock-zone-based crossover approach in its configuration.

A new structure of a FA is projected in this paper. The proposed design uses only 50 number of QCA cells in its implementation with a latency of 3 clock zones. The proposed 1-bit FA design conception has been checked for its structure robustness by designing various 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64-bit FA designs. The proposed FA designs save power from 46.87% to 25.55% at maximum energy dissipation of circuit level, 39.05% to 23.36% at average energy dissipation of circuit-level and 42.03% to 37.18% at average switching energy dissipation of circuit level.

This paper fulfills the gape of focused research for RMG with its detailed mathematical modeling analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of subjective and emotional well-being of workers in Bangladesh’s female-intensive export-oriented ready-made garments (RMG) factories based on a function of demographic, economic and psychological factors and work-place characteristics.

Employee-level data are obtained from a purposefully designed survey conducted in 2014 on 50 RMG factories located outside the country’s export processing zones. Dependent variables include domain-specific as well as overall life satisfaction. The analysis is quantitative in nature and based on ordered probit and (factory) fixed-effect regression models.

Compared to men, female workers are found to be more satisfied with life and financial situations and less depressed, a finding that is robust to controls for workplace characteristics and policies (e.g. provisions for childcare; higher presence of female supervisors; and management’s attitude toward work life balance) and factory fixed effects. This suggests that despite various compliance-related problems, employment in the RMG sector is intrinsically valued by female employees. Among other findings, although absolute income does not appear to affect well-being, relative income effect is statistically significant.

Although there is a sizable literature on the importance of decent jobs and women’s employment in low-pay manufacturing jobs in developing countries, studies on whether women intrinsically value such jobs are limited. Our study is unique in the sense that it draws on a purposefully designed survey conducted a year after the deadly collapse of RMG factory buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The incident exposed unsafe work conditions in which millions of women work in manufacturing sector around the developing world. To our knowledge, this is also the first paper on subjective assessment of work and non-work aspects of lives of women employed in Bangladesh’s RMG sector. The study also contributes to the international literature on the paradox of the contented female worker in low-pay jobs. Therefore, the paper will be of significant interest to readers from other countries that rely on apparel exports and depend on female labor.

This paper aims to examine the role of social auditing in legitimising the relationship between the buyer and supplier firms rather than strengthening corporate accountability in the global supply chain.

Applying case study methodology and drawing on Suchman’s theory on societal legitimacy, it is argued that social audits are artefacts of legitimacy, and global firms dominate the buyer–supplier relationship across the supply chain. The analysis is based on data collected from different secondary sources, including Walmart’s corporate sustainability reports.

Using Walmart’s relationship with Tazreen Fashions Limited around the Tazreen factory fire incident as a case study, it explains that the practices which attempt to symbolically demonstrate accountability from social audits need to shift to a more continuous and sincere demonstration of accountability through the social audit process. For this to occur, the cognitive and pragmatic approaches that international buyers have previously used in auditing their supply firms’ social responsibility are no longer sufficient to achieve societal legitimacy. Instead, a moral turn needs to underpin the intentions and actions of these buyers to maintain legitimacy and demonstrate accountability across the supply industry in developing economies.

The findings of the study answer the questions raised in the extant literature about the expectation from social auditing and whether social auditing serves to ensure corporate accountability. The paper contributes to the policymaking discussion of how social auditing can be configured to include a legal provision to ensure that social auditing is not a parroting tool for corporations.

This study illustrates the effects of the motivating factors (e.g. learning facilities, employees' compensation and working environment) on organizational attractiveness.

This is a quantitative study. This study investigates the hypotheses based on the 160 employee responses from the different garments operating in Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMGs) industry.

Using the structural equation modeling in Bangladesh's RMG industry, this paper argues that the working environment has a significant effect on organizational attractiveness in Bangladesh's RMG industry. This research study underlines that the working environment and employee compensations serve better than the employees learning facilities to grow employees RMG attraction.

The findings will help practitioners of the garment manufacturers to showcase the motivating factors for the employees in growing attraction for the industry. However, the research is limited to the garment industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Moreover, similar research can be extended further in other countries with bigger samples to draw a general conclusion for the RMGs' operating in Asia.

This paper brings a plea for the practitioners through this research's outcomes and provides useful indications of how organizations can motivate their employees to ensure organizational attractiveness for their garment industry.

The paper also contributes to the body of the literature relating to attractiveness in Bangladesh's RMG sector. Employees' participation in this research also confirms the unique context of the sector.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that enable total quality management (TQM) implementation in the readymade garment (RMG) sector of Bangladesh. More specifically, the present study is a supplement of the previous call from research to investigate the TQM-enabling factors from a broader aspect of organizational change.

This study was conducted through an online survey, followed by phone calls. Data were collected using a questionnaire survey with 256 respondents of the Bangladeshi RMG sector. The TQM-enabling factors were divided into five distinct groups, based on strategic or overall changes required within an organization for TQM implementation. A theoretical research model was created to investigate the contingency of various TQM-enabling factors. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to confirm the factor that enabled TQM implementation in the RMG sector of Bangladesh.

The main finding of this study shows that structural, strategic, contextual and human resource-enabling factors are significant to TQM implementation in the Bangladeshi RMG sector.

This study has been completed in single time frame. Therefore, consideration of the time factor is completely ignored in this research. Furthermore, understanding of TQM-enabling factors in this research relied on quantitative findings only. Also, this study was limited to one industry and one geographic region. However, this study could determine whether data triangulation will provide a good perception on enabling factors and the methodology can be extended to other industries and regions.

This study provides a research methodology for other manufacturing industries that are planning to implement TQM in their organization. This research will contribute to the existing literature by examining the contingency of various TQM-enabling factors in the context of the Bangladeshi RMG sector, and it, therefore, provides direction to increase the success rate of TQM implementation. Furthermore, the research methodology can be used in other studies for variation of contextual variables such as size of the industry, developed or underdeveloped country and manufacturing or service industry.

The methodology used in this study can lead the way for other industries in the RMG sector that implements TQM in their organization. Also, this research further contributes to the existing literature by investigating the contingency of various TQM enabling factors in the context of the Bangladeshi RMG sector and developing associated strategies to raise success rate of TQM implementation.

The primary aim of this paper is to evaluate the challenges before the growth of the ready-made garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh, the economy's backbone, and suggest appropriate reform.

The paper begins by tracing the growth and evolution of the RMG industry before identifying the challenges. It then proceeds to suggest appropriate reform for the same.

The paper argues for more effective models of collective bargaining and unionism as a solution to the problems that the industry faces.

The paper is the first of its kind in the sense that it is a comprehensive account of the challenges to the RMG industry in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMG) industry plays a vital role in the economic growth of this country. As the global trend in the fashion market has introduced a high-mix, low-volume ordering style, manufacturers are facing an increased number of changeovers in their production systems. However, most of the Bangladeshi RMG manufacturers are not yet ready to respond to such small orders and to improve the flexibility of their production systems. Consequently, the industry is falling behind in global market competition. Thus, this study aims to advance the current performance of RMG manufacturing operations to respond to the fast-fashion industry's challenges effectively using quick changeover.

In this study, a Single-Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is applied to attain quick changeover following the best practices of lean manufacturing.

This study examined the performance of the SMED technique to reduce changeover time in two case organisations. The changeover time was reduced by 70.76% from 434.56 min to 127.08 min and 42.12% from 2,664 min to 1,542 min for the case organisations, respectively. The results of this study show that companies require improved changeover times to address the demand for high-mix, low-volume orders.

This study will certainly guide practitioners of the RMG industry to adopt SMED to reduce changeover time to meet small batch production.

This e-book sheds light on the concept of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) in supply chains within a developing country context. This paper aims to investigate cognitive antecedents as well as behavioral consequences of corporate executives toward investing in strategic CSR. Moreover, it displays if and how strategic CSR contributes to creating performance benefits for the supplier.

This study is qualitative and exploratory in its nature. After drafting a five-dimensional framework from extant literature, it empirically elaborates on a case-study analysis based on primary data gathered through semi-structured interviews on ten executives (i.e. top executives, directors, owners) in large-size supplier companies within the Bangladeshi ready-made garment (RMG) supply chain.

First, it highlights altruism and performance as being cognitively and theoretically espoused in strategic CSR; yet, one appears to oust the other. Second, it demonstrates that if CSR-driven investments allow for a competitive positional betterment, as for suppliers in the Bangladeshi RMG industry, profit-driven CSR diffuses at the expense of altruism. Third, it confirms CSR’s strategic role as necessary but not sufficient for competitive advantage, delivering insights on suppliers’ future posture vis-à-vis CSR in the Bangladeshi RMG supply chains.

The e-book investigates strategic CSR’s struggle to maintain a balance between moral and profit-maximization motives at the cognitive level but being paradoxically required in supply chains. A limitation, inter alia, entails the focus on the horizontal perspective of the sample and the RMG supply chain.

The e-book provides valuable theoretical and practical insights by capitalizing on unique data retrieved from the Bangladeshi supply chain.

The readymade garments (RMG) industry acts as one of the foremost vital catalysts for financial as well as social advancement of Bangladesh. Due to the harsh impact of COVID-19, RMG sector has been confronting a never-seen-before phenomenon. Since the supply chain has seriously been influenced, concern raises among industry and policymakers on how to support against disturbances resulting from pandemics. Accordingly, this research aims to explore the vulnerability and capability factors of RMG sector in Bangladesh, their relationship and how these variables affect supply chain resilience.

A qualitative research design has been employed. In the first stage, content analysis has been performed. Since COVID-19 is a new experience, newspapers were the source to become acquainted with the vulnerability and capability factors following the guidelines provided by Pettit et al. (2010). In the second stage, in-depth interviews with key informants were conducted to investigate the relationship among the variables and how these factors may influence supply chain resilience.

This study identifies fourteen capability factors and their sub-factors of RMG industry in Bangladesh in order to improve the resilience capacity against the vulnerabilities in the context of COVID-19 pandemic.

This research is based on the setting of particular industry in Bangladesh, where respondents are immersed in a unique culture. Special care is required to generalize the results to other segments and phenomena.

The framework recognizes the balanced and unbalanced strength with the capability's components and find the relation between capabilities and vulnerabilities within the fashion industry. By creating the resilience network with the four conceivable positions, companies can find themselves with their capability's components and natural vulnerabilities.

This study investigates diverse components of capability figure against vulnerabilities to create the supply chain resilience. This paper, moreover, develops with four conceivable positions with their capabilities against existing vulnerabilities which brings timely contribution considering the context of COVID-19.