Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-4hvwz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-30T06:56:27.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Anti-Sweatshop Movement: Constructing Corporate Moral Agency in the Global Apparel Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Rebecca De Winter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines the impact of activist mobilization within the anti-sweatshop movement on shared understandings of corporate moral agency. The anti-sweatshop movement represents a transnational advocacy network, which arose in response to the global restructuring of the apparel industry and is organizing to demand that apparel manufacturers be accountable to communities, workers, and consumers. The movement has been central in contesting received notions of corporate rights and responsibilities and in reconstituting the boundaries of the corporate moral agent. Underpinning this investigation is a discussion of the ascription of moral agency to collective actors. With the aid of a relational approach, it is argued that corporate moral agency is a construct emerging out of social historical interactions that reflect processes through which the boundaries of actors are drawn and justified. Through the use of rhetoric linking private economic transactions and international labor and human rights standards, the movement has successfully challenged corporate practices that were previously considered unremarkable.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 2001 , pp. 99 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For a concise discussion of various approaches to conceptualizing corporate moral agency within the business ethics literature, see Richard Lippke, “Setting the Terms of the Business Responsibility Debate,”Social Theory and Practice 11 (Fall 1985), pp. 355–70.Google Scholar

2 While I speak of the anti-sweatshop movement as if it were a unitary actor, I fully realize that the construction of its agency must be problematized just like that of the corporation. Space constraints do not allow for thisGoogle Scholar.

3 Keck, Margaret and Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998Google Scholar).

4 Ibid., p. 3Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 17; and Laffey, Mark and Weldes, Jutta, “Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997), p. 203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Occidentalism: Rhetoric, Process, and Postwar German Reconstruction” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University Department of Political Science, 2001); and Schotter, John, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993Google Scholar).

7 Broad, Robin and Cavanagh, John, The Corporate Accountability Movement (Washington, D.C.: Study for the World Wildlife Fund's Project on International Financial Flows and the Environment, 1997), p. 1Google Scholar.

8 See Corporate Watch, Blood, Sweat and Shears: Corporate Codes of Conduct, athttp://www.corpwatch.org/trac/feature/sweatshops/codes.htmlGoogle Scholar.

9 Harvey, Pharis et al. , Developing Effective Mechanisms for Implementing Labor Rights in a Global Economy (Washington, D.C.: International Labor Rights Fund Workers in the Global Economy Project Papers, 2000Google Scholar), Sec. B; also available at http://www.laborrights.org/projects/globalecon/ilrf/index.html.

10 Abernathy, Frederick et al. , A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and Manufacturing: Lessons from the Apparel and Textile Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar).

11 Gereffi, Gary, “The Transformation of the North American Apparel Industry: Is NAFTA a Curse or Blessing?” Integration and Trade 4 (2000), pp. 46–95Google Scholar.

12 Ibid.; and Gereffi, Gary, “The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How U.S. Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks,” in Gereffi, Gary and Korzeniewicz, Miguel, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000Google Scholar).

13 Abernathy, et al. , A Stitch in Time, pp. 48ffGoogle Scholar.

14 Klein, Naomi, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 345Google Scholar.

15 Klein quotes Nike CEO Phil Knight as saying: “There is no value in making things anymore. The value is added in careful research, by innovation, and by marketing.” Ibid., p. 197.Google Scholar

16 Gereffi, Gary, “North American Apparel Industry,” p. 51Google Scholar.

17 Klein, No Logo, pp. 327ff.; and Appelbaum, Richard and Dreier, Peter, “The Campus Anti-Sweatshop Movement,” The American Prospect 46 (1999), pp. 71–78Google Scholar.

18 “White House Panel Releases Its Anti-Sweatshop Agenda,” Women's Wear Daily, November 14, 1998, p. 2Google Scholar.

19 The FLA currently has 155 member universities and the WRC has 80. See their respective Web sites atGoogle Scholarhttp://www.fairlabor.org and http://www.workersrights.org.

20 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus and Nexon, Daniel, “Relations Before States: Substance Process and the Study of World Politics,” European Journal of International Politics 5, No. 3 (1999), p. 291Google Scholar.

21 Abbott, Andrew, “Things of Boundaries,” Social Research 62 (Winter 1995), p. 860Google Scholar.

22 Klein, No Logo, pp. 7ffGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 335Google Scholar.

24 See the June 20 press release “Critical Mass Wins Grand Prix at Cyber Lions in Cannes”; available at http://www.criticalmass.com/low/news/press_0.html.

25 See the e-mail correspondence between Peretti and Nike on the Village Voice Web site, “Making Nike Sweat”; available at http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0107/jockbeat.php.

26 French, Peter, “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (July 1979), p. 209Google Scholar.

27 For a discussion of various legal theories of corporate personhood, see Hager, Mark, “Bodies Politic: The Progressive History of Organizational ‘Real Entity’ Theory,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 50 (Winter 1989)Google Scholar.

28 Dewey, John, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” Yale Law Journal 35 (April 1926), pp. 660–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Jackson, “Occidentalism,” p. 47Google Scholar.

30 Virginia Haufler, “Business Interests and Social Justice in the International Economy” (paper presented at Carnegie Council Workshop on Ethics, Actors, and Global Economic Architecture, New York, June 3–5, 1999)Google Scholar.

31 “Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology. ‘Communitarianism’ Finds Favor,”Washington Post, February 1, 2001Google Scholar.

32 For a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of anti-sweatshop mobilization, see Aaron Bernstein et al., “A World of Sweatshops: Progress Is Slow in the Drive to Better Conditions,”BusinessWeek Online, November 6, 2000Google Scholar.

33 See Jackson and Nexon, “Relations Before States,” pp. 291–332; and Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” pp. 857–82Google Scholar.

34 Virginia Haufler, “Business Interests.”Google Scholar

35 See Cutler, Claire, “Locating ‘Authority’ in the Global Political Economy,” International Studies Quarterly 43 (1999), pp. 59–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See French, “Moral Person.”Google Scholar

37 Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, “Corporations: Different Than You and Me,”Corporate Focus e-mail digest, January 24, 2001; available at http://lists.essential.org/piperniail/corp-focusGoogle Scholar.