Dialectics of dissociation

Analysts of contemporary capitalism have emphasized the shift from ‘standards’ markets to ‘status’ markets, and the proliferation of ‘orders of worth’ based on different conventions for conceptualizing and measuring quality (Aspers, 2009; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). In an ‘economy of qualities’ (Callon et al., 2002), the creation of monetary value depends on a strategy of differentiating products by forging associations between them and ‘other entities that represent positive nonmonetary value’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 49). This insight provides the point of departure for ‘Geographies of Dissociation: Value Creation, “Dark” Places, and “Missing” links’. In their essay, Ibert et al. (2019) develop the argument that positive associations are only part of the story; value creation also requires the work of negating undesirable associations.

At one level, the necessity of protecting brands from the reputational risks of negative publicity is already well understood. Because brands are assets premised on symbols and signs, negative associations can destabilize or undermine these semiotic systems, and thus destroy value (Oswald, 2015). Consequently, actors invested in the value of brands try to insulate brand assets from this kind of damage. Ibert et al. (2019) contribute to our understanding of this process by giving it a name—dissociation—and sketching out a theoretical and analytical approach to its study that draws inspiration from actor-network theory, critical commodity chain studies, and the anthropology of commodities.

The authors are particularly interested in highlighting the relational work that dissociation requires. Although the work of dissociation implicates consumers as well as producers, the authors choose to focus their discussion on the latter. In their conceptualization, ‘the decision makers who create and market an intended corporate identity…are the agents of dissociation while consumers are the target of such activities’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 50). As agents of dissociation, producers attempt both to avoid negative associations (what they call ‘proactive’ relational work) and to counter such associations when they ‘overflow’ (Callon, 1998) efforts to contain them (what they call ‘reactive’ relational work).

As Ibert et al. (2019) acknowledge but do not elaborate at length in their discussion, the relational work involved in creating, maintaining, and protecting the value of brands is an ongoing struggle between association and dissociation. One way this struggle plays out is through the contentious politics engaged in by ‘actors on the non-provider side (consumer initiatives, civil society organizations)’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 51). Via tactics such as ‘name and shame’ campaigns that link brands to the exploitation or abuse of workers or the environment, these protagonists square off against the owners of brands and the marketing firms, consultancies, and other service providers that support them.

In my commentary, I want to explore briefly the development of supply chain corporate social responsibility or ‘supply chain CSR’ (Bair and Palpacuer, 2015a) through the lens of dissociations. More specifically, my argument is that supply chain CSR can be understood as the accretion of ongoing struggles between association and dissociation. Civil society organizations, such as trade unions, student groups, faith-based organizations, and so on, that target brands by highlighting problems in their supply chains are engaged in a contest over value. They seek to force companies to reckon with harmful or unappealing elements of the production process by inserting negative associations into the semiotic circuit cultivated by brands. To be sure, civil society groups rarely succeed in eradicating the underlying causes of the problems they identify. Nevertheless, many of the brands targeted by their efforts now accept, at least discursively, responsibility for supply chain problems. The question I want to ask is not simply whether this development signals a shift in the terrain of struggle between brands and their critics, but also whether such a shift might provide insight into the limits of dissociation as a corporate practice.

Ibert et al. (2019) note that brands consciously exploit the ‘strategic ignorance’ created by the complex organizational and spatial ecologies of globalized production systems. This mode of relational work involves creating distance between branded products and undesired associations, such as ecological harm or labor exploitation. They observe that ‘stages in the provision of a commodity that are mobilized as valuable by branding tend to be close to, or even integrated within, the organizational structure of a brand owner’s company’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 54). In contrast, ‘[p]roblematic aspects (like poor working conditions, low wages, pollution)…can be exiled from the providers’ organization by subcontracting and outsourcing work to “third parties” often creating multiple tiers of suppliers’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 54).

Ibert et al.’s (2019) interpretation of outsourcing as proactive dissociation suggests a different explanation for the ‘make or buy decision’ than that offered by most accounts of global production. For example, scholars of global value chains (GVCs) argue that what tends to remain in-house are ‘intangible’ activities such as design and branding, which, being protected by barriers to entry like intellectual property rights, generate value in the form of rents. In comparison, activities such as assembly manufacturing or janitorial services that are subject to more competitive market conditions are prime candidates for outsourcing (Durand and Milberg, 2018; Gereffi and Stark, 2016). From the GVC perspective, then, what is externalized are activities that do not add value to the brand; from a dissociation perspective, what is externalized are activities that might threaten the value of the brand. In my view, it would be overstating the case to claim that dissociation is the primary motivation for organizational fixes such as outsourcing (or offshoring, as the spatial expression of distantiation). Nevertheless, Ibert el al.’s provocative formulation invites us to consider the degree to which global production networks are shaped by brands' ‘active management of relations for the purpose of reputation maintenance in a world of positional competition’ (2019: 55).

Of course, the activist and advocacy organizations pushing for the accountability of lead firms are well aware that brands try to place intermediaries between themselves and the problematic aspects of their supply chains. Arguably, the utility of these distantiation strategies has decreased over time. In the 1980s and 1990s, when companies like Nike and Gap were caught in a wave of supply chain scandals involving sweatshop conditions in offshore supplier factories, brands initially responded by claiming that they could not be held responsible for labor violations occurring in factories that they did not own or operate. Ultimately, however, many companies retreated from this position, agreeing under pressure to develop codes of conduct for their suppliers, and to monitor their suppliers’ compliance with them. Their decision to do so underscores the very Achilles' heel of branding that the concept of dissociation aims to diagnose: the value that is created by the semiotic circuit between branded products and positive associations can be destroyed by the introduction of negative associations. Indeed, the foundational logic of the anti-sweatshop movement and similar campaigns for corporate accountability is that activists can change the behavior of lead firms by threatening the value of their brands.

In collaborative work with Florence Palpacuer, I have analyzed the emergence and institutionalization of supply chain CSR as an ongoing process of contestation between corporations and their critics about the rights and responsibilities of business in the global political economy (Bair and Palpacuer, 2015a, 2015b). Ibert et al.’s (2019) discussion of dissociation complements this analysis by underscoring the struggles between association and dissociation that shape brand value. Ibert et al. argue that strategies like outsourcing allow for the management of reputational risk by delegating responsibility for ethical lapses to an external entity from which the lead firm can publicly disengage if necessary, which protects the brand from further corrosion. As I have suggested, however, this is becoming a riskier strategy, at least in some supply chain contexts, because corporate critics have named it (‘cutting and running’) and engaged in their own relational work to delegitimize it. Thus, while in the past, the lack of an equity tie might have been sufficient to insulate a brand from problems at a supplier facility, this is less often the case today, at least for highly visible and reputation-sensitive brands. Supply chain activists, by creating new discourses of accountability for lead firms, are shifting the terrain on which dissociation takes place.

To be sure, the precise nature and scope of this accountability is open to question. For the most part, brands focus their supply chain CSR efforts on the ‘upstream’ links in the supply chain closest to the final product. Take, for example, the Apple iPhone. The cell phone supply chain is long and complex, with links consisting of raw materials, intermediate inputs, and both ‘pre’ and ‘post’ production processes, such as design and marketing (Clelland, 2014). Concerns around ‘conflict materials’ notwithstanding, for Apple the weak link in this supply chain is the assembly process, which is carried out by independent contract manufacturers. The controversy stemming from the discovery of serious labor violations in a Chinese factory owned by Foxconn, Apple’s main supplier, threatened to damage the brand’s value by associating its sleek, sophisticated products with sweatshop conditions and suicidal employees.

The relational work necessary to create this risk to Apple was undertaken by civil society organizations, such as Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM). SACOM’s efforts to advocate on behalf of Chinese workers and secure improvements at Foxconn centered on convincing consumers that Apple and Foxconn are so closely linked as to share responsibility for what happens on Chinese shopfloors (Pun et al., 2016). In forging this association, SACOM sought to overcome both organizational separation (the firm boundary between Apple and its independent contractor) and geographical space (the distance between the supplier factory in China and the client’s corporate headquarters in California). Apple responded to the scandal by agreeing to take action, sponsoring an audit of the Foxconn facility and demanding that its supplier make changes to its practices. The degree to which these measures are solving the problems at Foxconn in a meaningful and lasting way is certainly open to debate. My point here is not that the particular measures adopted to ‘clean up’ supply chains are necessarily effective (Lüthje and Butollo, 2017). Rather, it is that the emergence of policies and practices regarding labor and ecological dimensions of supply chains is one manifestation of the struggle between association and dissociation at the heart of Ibert et al.’s (2019) analysis.

Supply chain CSR, then, is the synthesis created by a dialectic between the relational work done by civil society actors, who try to highlight negative associations between supply chain problems and branded products, and the relational work of branded actors that seek to counter these associations. As I have noted, one way that brands have dealt with these pressures is by accepting, albeit to varying degrees, the principle that they are responsible for maintaining labor or environmental standards along the supply chain, and developing a panoply of policies and practices that their suppliers are expected to follow. Here, too, supply chain CSR illuminates the dialectical nature of dissociation; it represents an effort on the part of lead firms to simultaneously forge positive associations with branded products (as connoting ethical and/or ecological behavior) and avoid negative ones (insofar as these measures actually reduce the likelihood of reputational risk from bad outcomes such as sweatshop scandals).

But Ibert et al. (2019) are surely correct to note that brands continue to exploit in other ways the myriad opportunities for dissociation that globalization creates. Contemporary production networks ‘appear to be in constant flux and many linkages have become notoriously ephemeral or are switched frequently’ (2019: 48). While brands are often criticized for ‘cutting and running’ from a problematic supplier once a problem has been identified, the routine volatility charactering production networks in many global industries is largely accepted as an essential feature of contemporary capitalism. As such, it represents a major challenge for activists and advocates, whose calls for accountability on the part of lead firms are frustrated by the short-term nature of sourcing relationships and the proliferation of (often short-lived) ties. The lack of traceability in supply chains is particularly acute for inputs such as cotton or leather, which as Ibert et al. note are ‘difficult to trace back to their origin, as they are pooled, sorted and then re-bundled’ (2019: 58).

Brands themselves cultivate such opacity and the plausible deniability that it provides. In their discussion of ‘strategic ignorance’, Ibert et al. (2019) observe that this dissociation strategy works best when actors share a commitment to ensuring that such ignorance is both widely shared and collectively maintained. It is worth noting in this context that the current frontier of supply chain activism focuses largely on two demands: (1) making supply chains more traceable and transparent to consumers and (2) encouraging collaboration and information-sharing among brands to counter the kind of systemic strategic ignorance that Ibert et al. (2019) describe.

Here, again, we see the dialectic of association and dissociation as it unfolds between brands and their critics. In my commentary, I have pointed to the way in which supply chain activists challenge the relational work of brands to distance themselves from reputational threats. I have also suggested that Ibert et al.’s (2019) perspective permits us to understand the development of supply chain CSR as itself a form of dissociation—that is, as an attempt to weaken or obscure ‘negative links between a branded commodity and other entities in order to let the desired associations overrule undesired ones’ (2019: 43). As these authors remind us, relational work ‘mobilizes meaning inscribed in historically contingent “ethico-political complexes”’ (Ibert et al., 2019: 45). One of the challenges for scholars of contemporary capitalism, then, is to understand how the relational work done by brands and their critics is both reflecting and transforming the ‘ethico-political’ landscape in which meaning and value are mutually constituted.