Clusters, Chains and Compliance: Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance in Football Manufacturing in South Asia

A recent concern in the debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries relates to the tension between demands for CSR compliance found in many global value chains (GVCs) and the search for locally appropriate responses to these pressures. In this context, an emerging and relatively understudied area of interest relates to small firm industrial clusters. Local clusters offer the potential for local joint action, and thus a basis for improving local compliance on CSR through collective monitoring and local governance. This article explores the interrelationship between global governance, exercised through GVC ties, and local governance, via cluster institutions, in ensuring compliance with CSR pressures. It undertakes a comparative analysis of two leading export-oriented football manufacturing clusters in South Asia that have both faced common challenges on child labour. The article shows that both forms vertical and horizontal governance have played a part in shaping the response of the two clusters on child labour. Moreover, these two distinct forms of governance have also led to quite differentiated outcomes in terms of forms of work organization and child labour monitoring. This raises broader questions on how global CSR demands can locally be better embedded and the conditions under which football stitchers labour in these new work forms. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Trade union participation in CSR deliberation: an evaluation

Whereas there has been considerable interest in the concept of political corporate social responsibility (CSR), trade unions have been largely omitted from such scholarly discussion. This article explores the potential of trade unions as the other in political CSR and the contribution of trade unions to deliberative democracy with the firm. We discuss the importance both of the legitimacy and the efficacy of the other in political CSR. We proceed to assess trade unions as legitimate and effective deliberative partners with the firm towards CSR, evaluating the contribution of trade unions to deliberative democracy and also the potential outcomes for trade unions in adopting this role

Fair trade and ethical trade: are there moves towards convergence?

Fair trade and ethical trade have traditionally had quite different aims, scope and modalities, the former principally focused on terms of trade with small scale producers and the latter on working conditions in mainstream production. Global value chain analysis suggests that this coincided with different forms of governance in the chain: fair trade reflecting relational governance based on trust and mutual dependence, while ethical trade was incorporated into the industrial coordination of buyer-driven, modular value chains. This paper explores the potential for greater synergy between the two as a result of recent developments, taking UK supermarket value chains as a case study. We conclude that convergence may occur in some supermarket chains, in a context of relational governance, while in others ethical trade and fair trade will remain inherently different. Whether and how convergence occurs will depend largely on the prevailing culture, values and strategies of the supermarket concerned. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Freedom of association in the Bangladeshi garment industry: A policy schizophrenia in labour regulation

The right to freedom of association is fundamental to the establishment of labour unionism as an institution. The Bangladesh government while requires enabling legal provisions for unionisation in its garments industry, as this paper explicates, its legal regulation for the right to freedom of association is in palsy to uphold the labour unionism. This paper argues for the necessity of legislation capable of drawing from the complementary skills and resources of the government, factory owners, labour unions, and global brands to secure a sustained commitment and contribution towards socio‐economic and political dimensions of labour relations in the Bangladesh RMG industry