“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research.

A growing body of scholarship analyzes the emergence and resilience of forced labor in developing countries within global value chains. However, little is known about how forced labor arises within domestic supply chains concentrated within national borders, producing products for domestic consumption. We conduct one of the first studies of forced labor in domestic supply chains, through a cross-industry comparison of the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labor in the United Kingdom. We find that understanding the dynamics of forced labor in domestic supply chains requires us to conceptually modify the global value chain framework to understand similarities and differences across these contexts. We conclude that addressing the governance gaps that surround forced labor will require scholars and policymakers to carefully refine their thinking about how we might design operative governance that effectively engages with local variation.

Over the past two decades multinational corporations have been expanding 'ethical' audit programs with the stated aim of reducing the risk of sourcing from suppliers with poor practices.

Abstract. This article critically investigates the growing power and effectiveness of the

The home states of multinational enterprises have in recent years sought to use public regulation to fill the gaps left by the absence of a binding labour standards framework in international law. This article examines recent home state initiatives to address forced labour, human trafficking, and slavery in global supply chains, and their interactions with private governance initiatives. Focusing on a case study of the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act and 2010 UK Bribery Act, we analyse two distinct legislative approaches that policy makers have used to promote corporate accountability within global supply chains and explore the varied impacts that these approaches have on corporate behaviour. Empirically, we analyse codes of conduct, annual CSR reports, and supplier terms and conditions for 25 FTSE 100 companies to shed light into the impact of the legislation on corporate behaviour. We find that legislation that creates criminal corporate liability appears to spur deeper changes to corporate strategy, and argue that in the case of the Modern Slavery Act, the triumph of voluntary reporting over more stringent public labour standards seems to have undermined the effectiveness of recent governance initiatives to address forced labour in global supply chains.

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This article challenges the tendency to conceptualize contemporary debt bondage as an individualized relationship between employer and victim. It highlights the systemic relations of inequality that underpin debt bondage in advanced capitalist countries, focusing on temporary migrant workers in the United States. It advances two interlocking arguments. First, that debt bondage in the US market is rooted in processes of ‘neoliberalization’ that have left dispossessed populations few alternatives but to sell themselves into coercive labor markets. Second, that debt operates as a class-based form of power that disciplines all sectors of the labor market, albeit in variegated forms and degrees. Far from an archaic or non-capitalist social relation, debt bondage must be understood as a profitable strategy of labor discipline anchored in state regulatory frameworks that have bolstered the power of employers and facilitated predatory and privatized forms of credit and lending as solutions to poverty and unemployment.

Over the last decade, the norm of corporate accountability for labour standards in global supply chains has become increasingly prominent within the transnational governance arena. As global governance initiatives to spur due diligence for labour standards and combat exploitation in global supply chains—especially its most severe forms frequently described as modern slavery—have proliferated, societal coalitions have pressured states to pass domestic legislation to the same effect. In this article, we examine the regulatory processes that spurred the passage of one piece of anti-slavery legislation, the UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Our findings corroborate a number of established expectations regarding business opposition towards new legislation to raise public labour standards, but also provide a clearer picture of the mechanisms through which industry actors impact policymaking processes. Paradoxically, such mechanisms include business actors’ championing of weak regulatory initiatives, CSR activity and partnering with civil society organizations. Understanding industry actors’ use of these strategies improves our understanding of how transnational norms of corporate accountability and anti-slavery are being contested and shaped at domestic scales.