Doctoral Dissertation Research: Managing Global Guilt and Local Norms: Regulation in the Sri Lankan Clothing Industry

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GEOGRAPHY AND SPATIAL SCIENCES PROGRAM ABSTRACT 1002624 John Pickles Annelies M. Goger University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill DDRI: Managing Global Guilt and Local Norms: Regulation in the Sri Lankan Clothing Industry Since the 1980s, trade liberalization and the subsequent globalization of production networks have generated widespread concerns about a lack of regulation in the clothing industry, specifically about practices such as unsafe working conditions, child labor, low wages, and unstable employment. The universal compliance codes and monitoring systems devised to address these problems -- herein called ethical initiatives -- have not met the central objective of standardization, addressed root causes, or accounted for cultural specificities in the meaning of ethical. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate the politics of ethical governance in global clothing supply chains with a focus on how global power dynamics, local norms, and gender relations shape notions of ethical in Sri Lanka. In addition to interrogating how the meaning of ethical is contested at multiple scales, the project will compare ethical initiatives in export processing zones and villages in Sri Lanka because they have very different geographies of labor. Drawing from theoretical foundations in global value chains, apparel industry ethnographies, and feminist geography, the study asks: (1) How have key global and national stakeholders (buyers, consumer groups, unions, the state) responded to recent changes in the global economy to formulate new priorities for ethical initiatives (2) How do different contextual dynamics in EPZs and villages shape the forms and practices of ethical initiatives (3) How do Sri Lankan debates over gender roles influence labor relations in the garment industry and how are they incorporated into the forms and practices that ethical initiatives take on. Due to its emphasis on multiple scales of governance, this study requires multi-sited fieldwork with key ethical initiative actors in Europe and the United States and extended fieldwork in Sri Lanka. Multiple methods are used including semi-structured interviews, factory site visits and surveys, factory manager life histories, worker focus groups, discourse analysis, archival research, and participant observation of multi-stakeholder forums. The findings will demonstrate the significance of local norms and labor geographies in shaping how ethical initiatives are implemented, the political inner-workings of ethical initiatives in global supply chains, and the ways in which debates about gender manifest in ethical initiatives in Sri Lanka. Beyond Sri Lanka, this study engages with broader debates about global governance and ethical trade, which is why the multi-sited component with global actors is necessary. Theoretically and methodologically, it will engage sub-fields that are rarely brought into conversation: global value chains and apparel industry ethnographies. Moreover, it will draw from the understudied case of Sri Lanka's best practice ethical initiatives to inform debates about how to address the lack of engagement of workers, suppliers, and local organizations in the design and evaluation of ethical initiatives. The study also investigates the potential dangers of locally embedded approaches such as a continued lack of engagement with workers in program design. This project is important at a national level because ethical initiatives are now a core aspect of Sri Lanka's global competitiveness strategy. In these ways, the research can make important contributions to global policy initiatives on ethical trade with the goal of generating more reflexive and context-specific approaches.