John Pickles Annelies M. Goger University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
DDRI: Managing Global Guilt and Local Norms: Regulation in the Sri Lankan Clothing Industry
Since the 1980s, trade liberalization and the subsequent globalization of production networks have generated widespread concerns about a lack of regulation in the clothing industry, specifically about practices such as unsafe working conditions, child labor, low wages, and unstable employment. The universal compliance codes and monitoring systems devised to address these problems -- herein called ethical initiatives -- have not met the central objective of standardization, addressed root causes, or accounted for cultural specificities in the meaning of ethical. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate the politics of ethical governance in global clothing supply chains with a focus on how global power dynamics, local norms, and gender relations shape notions of ethical in Sri Lanka. In addition to interrogating how the meaning of ethical is contested at multiple scales, the project will compare ethical initiatives in export processing zones and villages in Sri Lanka because they have very different geographies of labor. Drawing from theoretical foundations in global value chains, apparel industry ethnographies, and feminist geography, the study asks: (1) How have key global and national stakeholders (buyers, consumer groups, unions, the state) responded to recent changes in the global economy to formulate new priorities for ethical initiatives (2) How do different contextual dynamics in EPZs and villages shape the forms and practices of ethical initiatives (3) How do Sri Lankan debates over gender roles influence labor relations in the garment industry and how are they incorporated into the forms and practices that ethical initiatives take on. Due to its emphasis on multiple scales of governance, this study requires multi-sited fieldwork with key ethical initiative actors in Europe and the United States and extended fieldwork in Sri Lanka. Multiple methods are used including semi-structured interviews, factory site visits and surveys, factory manager life histories, worker focus groups, discourse analysis, archival research, and participant observation of multi-stakeholder forums. The findings will demonstrate the significance of local norms and labor geographies in shaping how ethical initiatives are implemented, the political inner-workings of ethical initiatives in global supply chains, and the ways in which debates about gender manifest in ethical initiatives in Sri Lanka.
Beyond Sri Lanka, this study engages with broader debates about global governance and ethical trade, which is why the multi-sited component with global actors is necessary. Theoretically and methodologically, it will engage sub-fields that are rarely brought into conversation: global value chains and apparel industry ethnographies. Moreover, it will draw from the understudied case of Sri Lanka's best practice ethical initiatives to inform debates about how to address the lack of engagement of workers, suppliers, and local organizations in the design and evaluation of ethical initiatives. The study also investigates the potential dangers of locally embedded approaches such as a continued lack of engagement with workers in program design. This project is important at a national level because ethical initiatives are now a core aspect of Sri Lanka's global competitiveness strategy. In these ways, the research can make important contributions to global policy initiatives on ethical trade with the goal of generating more reflexive and context-specific approaches.
Because previous research on the clothing industry has tended to focus either very broadly on international trade patterns or very specifically on everyday life in a single factory, the intellectual merit of my project is that it promotes a greater understanding of governance and coordination in clothing supply chains as a whole—from the shop floor to corporate boardrooms. With the challenges of globalization and governance in mind, I focused on what it means to be more "ethical" as a key actor in the supply chain for clothing and how priorities are struggled over by actors throughout the supply chain that spans different contexts and ethical norms. In Sri Lanka, the industry has endeavored to build a reputation for being more ethical, with long-standing community-development projects and three of the first environmentally friendly clothing factories in the world. Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork in the United States, Europe, and Sri Lanka, my key findings were: 1) Tight labor markets and local/national ethical concerns about women have driven the industry to adopt more ethical practices in the first place. Consumer demand in Western markets enhanced the drive to undertake these efforts later on. 2) What it means to be "ethical" and to be a "good employer": there is a political tension between empowering young women and reproducing patriarchal relations that limits efforts to increase skills and other higher value activities. This has positioned the garment industry as a key site through which gender relations, national identities, notions of work, and what it means to be a "good" worker, manager, or company are contested and rearticulated. 3) Market failures exist in global value chains: incentives for ethical innovations such as price premiums or more orders have not materialized. To compensate for this, many Sri Lankan producers are reorganizing production to maximize efficiency and flexibility—a process that requires high skill, extensive efforts to retain workers, and a workplace culture of continuous learning. Beyond the direct impacts of my project as a training opportunity for a doctoral student, my project is having broader impacts as I disseminate my findings through the courses that I teach, conference papers that I present, research collaborations that I am participating in (such as the Capturing the Gains project), and the articles that I will ultimately publish. My research constructively contributes to global policy work on ethical trade by emphasizing more reflexive and context-specific approaches. I have already presented preliminary findings to policymakers at the International Labour Organisation Better Work Conference. My research also informs broader public debates about the changing nature of governance, the state, the responsibilities of corporations and consumers, and the possibilities for resolving the crisis of legitimacy that capitalism has faced with the rise of authoritarian capitalism and persistence of economic crisis. My project does this by looking in depth at one industry and how it has reorganized in order to make some attempts to be more "ethical" despite growing competitive pressures and the reluctance of consumers to pay more for "ethical" goods. Finally, as I have presented my research to groups of high school students in my home town and to factory managers in one of the factories that I studied, it has struck me how pervasive certain assumptions and oversimplified explanations are about what drives sourcing patterns for clothing and the assumption that all clothing production in Asia is exploitative and takes place in a sweatshop. Because my findings provide a more nuanced and complex picture of how these processes are working in our present-day economy, my research can help inform consumers, buyers, non-profits, and producers of the flawed assumptions they may be making every day as economic and social actors.
