Transparency and value chain sustainability

By Arthur P. J. Mol. 2015

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rise of transparency on the public and political agendas is not an accident or fad, soon to be replaced by another timely topic in sustainability politics and governance. Transparency will remain a key topic in global value chains and will further develop as it piggy-backs on wider social developments such as globalization, the information age, and the shifting role of states in environmental governance. Transparency in value chains is bound up with positive connotations: the more transparency the better it is for the sustainability of chains and for the empowerment of consumers and civil society. But an overall positive past assessment of value chain transparency does not automatically extend into the future as new challenges lie ahead. This paper investigates the new challenges for value chain transparency and their consequences. Due to the growing importance attached to transparency in value chains it becomes a central object of power struggles, with uncertain outcomes. Markets and states seek to capture transparency arrangements for their own goals, which may not be in line with the assumed normative linkages between value chain transparency and increased power for consumers and civil society. In that sense, transparency is losing its innocence: more transparency is no longer always the best for citizen-consumer empowerment and for the sustainability of value chains. But value chain secrecy is not an attractive alternative. This opens a new research agenda on how transparency should be organized and arranged in value chains to live up to the promises of democracy and sustainability.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2dff3927c02e214f372ec5169779b149d717897a

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In Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Sustainability governance of chains and networks: a review and future outlook (2015, background): “New questions are being asked about who provides what information to whom, both in and outside the chain; stylised by Mol (2015) as management, regulatory, consumer and public transparency.”
Blockchain applications in supply chains, transport and logistics: a systematic review of the literature (2019, background): “While Gualandris et al. (2015) and Mol (2015) focus on supply chain sustainability through accountability and transparency in the Traceability/Transparency cluster, Kouhizadeh and Sarkis (2018), Saberi et al. (2019) and Kshetri (2018) specifically investigate the role of blockchains in ensuring…”
Trade-offs in Supply Chain Transparency: The Case of Nudie Jeans Co (2015, background): “Such increased surveillance and control pressure (Mol, 2013) on suppliers through transparency has also been proven, in a study of the ILO Better Work program in Cambodia, to lead to improved sustainability compliance in supplier factories (Ang et al., 2012).”