Global production networks (GPNs) connect multiple producers involved in fragmented manufacturing processes. Major brands and retailers, considered as lead firms, are under increasing pressure to ensure products made through GPNs are produced sustainably. Theories of governance developed to understand dynamics in outsourced production can provide insight into this issue. However, these theories and related empirical research have often focused on relationships between lead firms and upper-tier suppliers. When manufacturing involves multiple fragmented stages, understanding the role of lead firms becomes more difficult. This article considers new governance roles that lead firms, as buyers, are playing when attempting to promote sustainable practices across all stages of production for buyer-driven industries. The focus is exploring the nature of new governance approaches which lead firms have developed in order to address diverse sustainability challenges found within GPNs, particularly related to lower-tier suppliers. These approaches can involve lead firms working through vertical buyer-seller links or developing new horizontal relationships, which link lead firms with lower-tier suppliers and governance processes in these suppliers' local productive systems. The findings draw from field research examining how top UK garment retailers provide governance to producers involved in creating cotton garments in India and a review of publicised policies and practices of these retailers related to promoting sustainable production. Five types of governance mechanisms that can involve vertical or horizontal links are identified. Considering the growth of new governance relationships expands previous conceptions of the roles of lead firm governance.
Research considering globalized production as taking place within global production networks and global value chains has potential to provide insights into the challenges of sustainable production. However, studies employing these approaches to look at manufactured products have often concentrated on connections between lead buyers and upper tier suppliers and given insufficient attention to exploring interactions across all stages of production. In this article, the concept of extended supplier networks is introduced to address this gap by explicitly looking at how all stages of production are connected. The extended supplier network model that is presented provides an analytical framework that enables multiple scales of analysis in the study of sustainability challenges.
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 supply chains. The authors identify three approaches of buyer engagement: auditing, capacity building and advocacy. Drawing on interviews conducted with European brands and retailers, the article shows how buyers perceive the merits and challenges of these approaches, and whether and how they discharge responsibility and power through these activities. The study shows that the Accord is seen primarily as part of the auditing approach with a key feature being its use of collective leverage as a means of enforcement. While greater buyer power has not necessarily been accompanied by greater responsibility, the article highlights heterogeneity among buyers in how they take up different approaches, painting a more nuanced picture of buyer responsibility and power.
This article questions retailers’ role as buyers driving production. Exploring a network involving Indian suppliers of UK retailers’ cotton garments, limitations preventing coercive buyer power from controlling production practices are identified. Overall, the dominant system of large-scale fragmented supplier networks connecting raw materials to final products accommodates commercially viable practices causing social or environmental challenges. While some pressures effectively span complex networks, buyers’ practice-related demands do not. Dissecting the ‘drivenness’ concept, this study shows multipolar governance within an industry often considered buyer-driven. Also, it furthers critiques of private governance’s effectiveness, indicating the need for alternative governance frameworks or network structures.
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