Competition & Change

This article contributes to debate on the evolving expressions of business responsibility in emerging market economies and developing economies by exploring and theorizing the ways in which the Fairtrade standard for supply chains is being re-worked and implemented in South Africa. To understand the changing ways in which the global Fairtrade standard is embedded in South Africa, the article argues for attention not only to recent strategic re-articulations of the standard through national-level initiatives, but also to the localized experiences of producer groups, including those in peripheral regions. This argument is supported by interview-based research revealing the challenges faced by a particular Fairtrade producer community — Eksteenskuil Agricultural Cooperative (EAC) in the Northern Cape. A relational approach developed from economic geography shows how challenges concerning market access, land tenure and community empowerment for this producer emerge from a combination of global Fairtrade conventions, South Africa's dynamic national-institutional context and local politics of place.

This article examines the role of the informal economy in e-waste management in India employing field research conducted in the National Capital Region in 2011/12. It analyses the spatial linkages of the Indian e-waste industry with the international network of waste transfer and treatment using the global production network (GPN) framework. The article asserts that an understanding of the nature and functions of the informal sector, based on its theoretical foundations, enriches the global value chain (GVC) and GPN analyses. This is demonstrated through an analysis and discussion of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) production and processing and the (in)efficacy of legislation regulating these activities. Finally, the article locates Indian waste processing within the global architecture of e-waste movement and management and reflects on diverse perceptions of waste.

Deploying an approach to chain analysis concerned with regional differentiation and backshoring, this article investigates the regional complexities of the garment commodity chain in India and its multiple local sweatshop regimes to illustrate the limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) norms. First, the article shows that India's distinctively regional organization of production and product specialization, arising from different local historical legacies of production, reproduces labour outcomes that prevent the effectiveness of CSR. Second, it shows that the backshoring practices used by a powerful group of Pan-Indian buyer-exporters, who increasingly behave like global buyers, further reproduce the logic of the local sweatshop, hence reinforcing the limitations of corporate approaches to labour standards.

This article contributes insights to the emerging literature on the potential interaction between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and public regulation of labour standards in global and national value chains. Based on a case study of an endogenous CSR initiative recently introduced by the Brazilian Association of Apparel Retailers (ABVTEX), the article explores how this incipient experience may offer the potential to bridge two prevalent regulatory gaps in value chains. First, communication is being fostered gradually between a private sector audit programme and the public labour inspection, pointing toward ways in which private and public action can play complementary roles in the promotion of labour standards in value chains. Second, the design of this CSR initiative seeks to extend monitoring beyond first-tier suppliers to identify vulnerable workers in subcontracted firms at lower tiers within value chains, in response to a response to a commission report of the São Paulo City Council, which advised that retailers cannot use clauses in supplier contracts to outsource responsibility for labour standards in their value chains.

This article analyses how cluster integration in global value chains affects social upgrading processes in two local industrial districts in the agro-industrial sector (oil for cosmetics and organic honey) located in the Northeast of Brazil, which are both involved in fair trade relations with foreign clients. Several lessons are drawn on the basis of these case studies in relation to how economic upgrading can be aligned with social upgrading in local cluster settings. We conclude that global value chain linkages cannot alone explain the social upgrading processes that we observe in these cases. The presence of strong local organizations was key in driving social upgrading processes both prior to and after the insertion of both industrial clusters into the global economy.