IntroductionSince the mid-1990s, commodity-chain expose¨s have become standard fare in popular media portrayals of globalization. Whether produced by muckraking journalists, advocacy groups, or some combination of the two, these stories of sweatshops, plantation slavery, and blood diamonds depict, graphically if formulaically, the abuses suffered by workers and nature on one end, the excesses of luxury and choice afforded to affluent consumers on the other end, and the immense profits accumulated en route. (1) The formula has proven remarkably effective in driving one consumer-goods industry after anotheröeither in response to an expose¨, or in order to preempt oneöto pledgè responsibility' for the conditions under which their goods are produced. As a result, farms and factories in the remotest, cheapest-labor reaches of transnational supply chains find themselves subject to stringent codes of`ethical' conduct and`best practice', to serial audits and surprise inspections.All this media and corporate attention to long-obscured labor processes raises, in turn, at least two challenges for the scholarly analysis of geographies of work. First, it suggests we need to give more serious consideration to popular media portrayals of work in the globalized economy. We need to consider how these stories are produced, and by whom, and how they are implicated for better or worse in new forms of transnational commodity-chain governance. Second, we need to examine what alternative geographies of work these stories advocate, whether explicitly or implicitly.Here I take up these challenges by examining how, in Britain, the popular media and certain nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have come to participate in the governance of work in the fresh-produce supply chains of supermarkets, especially those in Africa. These actors have helped create what I call here the`ethical complex' of British corporate food retailing: that is, a condition compelling supermarkets to respond, in various ways, to NGO demands for ethical sourcingöa term which itself has taken on multiple meanings. This condition reflects, in part, broader trends in corporate management practices; in part, Britain's recent history of food scares and Abstract. In this paper I explore how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the popular media in Britain have been able to pressure Britain's top supermarkets to undertake`ethical' reforms of their global supply chains. I argue that, although the`ethical complex' of British supermarkets is the product of unique historical and geographic circumstances, it also testifies to the capacity of agro-food activists to amplify their influence through the popular media. More broadly, it complicates assumptions about the demise of the Habermasian`public sphere' at a time when massive corporations control both the media and the food supply. Three case studies of NGO campaigns illustrate this point. At the same time, however, they point to tensions between the international scope of certain NGO campaigns for supermarket`ethical refor...