Niklas Egels-Zandén

• PhD
• Professor at University of Gothenburg

In response to anti-sweatshop activism, lead firms in global production networks (GPNs) have adopted voluntary corporate social responsibility commitments such as codes of conduct. Scholars have begun to examine whether and how these shape labour conditions at the point of production, but existing research either focuses on a small number of cases...

Sustainability concerns have increasingly moved up the corporate agenda, and corporate managers and academics alike stress the need to integrate sustainability into corporate strategy to both create competitive advantages and mitigate sustainability problems. Despite numerous conceptual studies of how sustainability should be integrated in strategy...

Anti-sweatshop activists have turned global production networks (GPNs) into contested organizational fields. Although this contest has triggered the growth of an extensive literature on contested GPNs, the scholarly conversation is still limited in two important ways: First, it ignores or dismisses the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SM...

Outsourcing has led both to the embedding of questionable sustainability practices in opaque supply chains and to anti-sweatshop challenges demanding more transparent supply chains. Previous research has argued that supply chain transparency can be both a consumer tool empowering consumers to pressure disclosing firms to improve sustainability cond...

Though transparency is increasingly central to corporate sustainability and sustainable supply chains, the scholarly conversation about supply chain transparency is limited, as it defines supply chain transparency inconsistently and lacks an empirical basis. We address these shortcomings by developing a multidimensional definition of supply chain t...

Using data from interviews with multiple respondents from supply chain labor governance institutions in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany, we conduct a comparative analysis of the rise of the Ethical Trading Initiative, a union-inclusive multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI), to national dominance in the United Kingdom and the failure of two unio...

The purpose of this report is to explore why social and environmental sustainability initiatives designed to incentivise garment producers by presenting win-win business cases have not scaled up to make widespread impact. The production of this report entailed interviewing representatives from garment brands and retailers, producers, and programme...

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (‘the Accord’) has received both praise and criticism concerning its implications for corporate responsibility and power. This article contributes to the debate by situating the Accord within a broader set of activities that buyers are engaged in to promote better labour conditions in their suppl...

Local supplier corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries represents a powerful tool to improve labour conditions. This paper pursues an inter-organizational network approach to the global value chain (GVC) literature to understand the influence of suppliers’ collective behaviour on their CSR engagement. This exploratory study of...

Garment Supply Chain Governance Project Final Report

To address substandard working conditions in global value chains, companies have adopted private regulatory systems governing worker rights. Scholars agree that without onsite factory audits, this private regulation has limited impact at the point of production. Companies, however, audit only a subset of their suppliers, severely restricting their...

As an Introduction to the Debate section that follows, this article develops the concept of ‘Networks of Labour Activism’ (NOLA) as a distinct, and important, aspect of cross-border, cross-organizational mobilization of workers, trade unions and other organizations and groups. NOLAs are seen as different from traditional labour activist networks in...

Handeln har länge kretsat kring det personliga mötet där den fysiska butiken - affären - har spelat en betydande roll för hur affärer görs. När handeln nu digitaliseras väcks en rad frågor om hur framtidens affärer kommer att se ut. I boken problematiseras och diskuteras handelns digitalisering med utgångspunkt i den fysiska butiken. Vidare behan...

Background: In managing chemical risks to the environment and human health in supply chains, voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures, such as auditing code of conduct compliance, play an important role. Objectives: To examine how well suppliers’ chemical health and safety performance complies with buyers’ CSR policies and whether a...

Purpose – Digitalization denotes an on-going transformation of great importance for the retail sector. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the phenomenon of the digitalization of retailing by developing a conceptual framework that can be used to further delineate current transformations of the retailer-consumer interface. Design/methodology/ap...

http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/10/21/ser.mwv023.short?rss=1 Scholars often rely on static and distant images of “decoupling” to describe the limited influence of “corporate social responsibility,” among other organizational and global scripts. New insights can be gained by looking closely at how local advocates seek to leverage...

Conflicts between labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often impede private labor regulatory attempts to protect worker rights at supplier factories. Based on a study of a failed private regulatory attempt for Swedish garment retailers, we contribute to existing research into union–NGO relations by demonstrating how conflict arises...

The rise of private regulation of sustainability in global production networks has led to intensive debates about the impact of this regulation at the point of production. Yet, few empirical studies have systematically examined this impact in practice. Based on multiple factory audits of 43 garment factories conducted by the multi-stakeholder initi...

Scholars stress that firms need to integrate sustainability into their strategies, calling for more research into how sustainable strategies are formed in practice. This has led to convergence of the fields of sustainability and strategic management, though sustainability scholars have so far neglected the influential strategy-as-practice (s-as-p)...

Does private regulation of workers’ rights in global value chains improve working conditions on the factory floor? Drawing on one of the first systematic longitudinal studies of supplier compliance with multinational corporation (MNC) codes of conduct, this paper finds—in contrast to previous research—substantial improvements over time. While in 20...

As the economy becomes increasingly specialised and globalised, the importance of logistics also increases. For global transportation systems, seaports play a key role as transhipment hubs. As seaports incorporate and coordinate hinterland logistic activities within the activities of the port, the strategies they employ influence the decisions made...

Codes of conduct are the main tools to privately regulate worker rights in global value chains. Scholars have shown that while codes may improve outcome standards (such as occupational health and safety), they have had limited impact on process rights (such as freedom of association and collective bargaining). Scholars have, though, only provided v...

In June 2011, a proud email circulates around the world. It reports that Indonesian trade unions have signed a contract regarding Freedom of Association, with both a number of retail chains selling sporting goods, apparel, and footwear—such as Nike, Adidas, and so on—and the largest Indonesian producers of garments and footwear. The signing of the...

The protection of workers’ rights is at the heart of the ongoing debate on business ethics. In balancing transnational corporations’ (TNCs) influence in private regulatory systems intended to protect workers’ rights in emerging economies, several authors have emphasized the importance of cooperative relationships between unions and NGOs. In practic...

Stakeholder theory is one of the most influential theories in business ethics. It is perhaps not surprising that a theory as popular as stakeholder theory should be used in different ways, but when the disparity between different uses becomes too great, it is questionable whether all the ‘stakeholder research’ refers to the same underlying theory....

Despite extensive academic debate as to what corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other related concepts ought to encompass, there is a lack of critical analysis of what CSR in practice entails, i.e., what actually constitutes CSR practices. This paper critically addresses this question by focusing on one of the most influential CSR initiative...

Over the past decade, discussion has flourished among practitioners and academics regarding workers’ rights in developing countries. The lack of enforcement of national labour laws and the limited protection of workers’ rights in developing countries have led workers’ rights representatives to attempt to establish transnational industrial relations...

In twentieth century Europe and the USA, industrial relations, labour, and workers’ rights issues have been handled through collective bargaining and industrial agreements between firms and unions, with varying degrees of government intervention from country to country. This industrial relations landscape is currently undergoing fundamental change...

Despite extensive research on corporate responsibility, little research exists on how the inter-organizational processes of defining corporate responsibility develop. In this paper, we present a framework based on actor-network theory (ANT) for analysing these processes. The developed framework is illustrated in a study of the redefinition of Swedi...

In the ongoing globalization of business, transnationalindustrial relations systems are emerging as complements to the traditional nationalsystems. Integral to the emergent transnational systems are International Framework Agreements (IFAs). This chapter shows that a previously unrecognised key aspect of IFAs is that they shift the locus of influen...

Despite extensive corporate responsibility research into both what products firm produce and how they produce them, research is lacking in one product category in which the what and how linkage create questionable corporate practice - luxury products. Luxury is in some cases created by companies controlling the so-called user imagery of their custo...

Following the offshoring of production to developing countries by transnational corporations (TNCs), unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have criticised working conditions at TNCs’ offshore factories. This has led to the emergence of two different approaches to operationalising TNC responsibilities for workers’ rights in developing cou...

Despite increased academic and practitioner interest in codes of conduct, there has been little research into the actual compliance of suppliers in developing countries with the codes of conduct of multinational corporations (MNCs). This paper addresses this lack by analysing Chinese suppliers’ level of compliance with Swedish toy retailers’ codes...

While cross-sectoral partnerships are frequently presented as a way to achieve sustainable development, some corporations that first tried using the strategy are now changing direction. Growing tired of what are, in their eyes, inefficient and unproductive cross-sectoral partnerships, firms are starting to form post-cross-sectoral partnerships (‚po...

In the current era, governments are playing smaller roles in regulating workers’ rights internationally, and transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in the struggle for workers’ rights, and labour/trade unions have started to fill this governance gap. This paper focuses on the least researched of the relati...

Hundreds of concepts have been proposed for describing how ethical issues in business should be defined. In this paper, I review how the six most commonly used concepts have been defined. This is a contribution to the international business ethics research, since hardly any academic work has reviewed more than one or two concepts simultaneously. Th...

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are beginning to explore low-income markets in Africa in search of legitimacy and growth opportunities. This paper examines the CSR (corporate social responsibility) aspects of this trend by analysing: (a) how the processes of defining CSR develop when MNCs enter low-income markets in Africa; and (b) what the outco...

Although stakeholder theory has been extensively discussed in academic research, the in- strumental version of the theory has only received sparse attention. The purpose of this pa- per is to start to fill this research void by contributing to the development of instrumental stakeholder theory in three important ways. First, I show that instrumenta...