Codes in context: How states, markets, and civil society shape adherence to global labor standards: Codes in context

By Michael W. Toffel, Jodi L. Short, Melissa Ouellet. 2015

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transnational business regulation is increasingly implemented through private voluntary programs—like certification regimes and codes of conduct—that diffuse global standards. But little is known about the conditions under which companies adhere to these standards. We conduct one of the first large-scale comparative studies to determine which international, domestic, civil society, and market institutions promote supply chain factories’ adherence to the global labor standards embodied in codes of conduct imposed by multinational buyers. We find that suppliers are more likely to adhere when they are embedded in states that participate actively in the ILO treaty regime and that have stringent domestic labor law and high levels of press freedom. We further demonstrate that suppliers perform better when they serve buyers located in countries where consumers are wealthy and socially conscious. Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of overlapping state, civil society, and market governance regimes to meaningful transnational regulation.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/febf311a90e6d42bf837ba8429f5574abb339ee2

Citations in the corpus

• New Evidence on the Role of the Media in Corporate Social Responsibility (2016, unknown): “We include measures of media freedom from Freedom House and from Reporters Without Borders [as considered by Hartmann and Uhlenbruck (2015) and Toffel et al. (2015), respectively].”