THE FURNITURE SHOPPING TRIP WAS MORE COMPLICATED THAN expected. Searching for a new headboard, my wife and I (Bartley) hoped we would find something that was well made, preferably under decent conditions. When we asked about items made from wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, we mostly got blank stares or information that seemed intended to divert our attention. One saleswoman was telling us proudly about the store’s furniture being made in the USA when we saw “Made in Vietnam” stamped in large letters on the back of one piece. We knew that logs were being harvested illegally—not to mention unsustainably—in Laos, Indonesia, and Russia and shipped to factories in Vietnam and China to make furniture for consumers in North America and Europe. We also knew that the young women and men working in these factories endured health hazards and long hours to meet the low prices and fast delivery times that retailers demanded. Not that “Made in the USA,” even if we could find it, would be a perfect guarantee either, since labor laws are frequently violated here as well, and unsustainable forestry is not unique to developing countries.
After much head scratching, we stopped browsing and bought a cheap used headboard from a Craigslist ad. We might have even felt good about this for a moment, since we could claim to be resisting a culture of disposability and overconsumption. But we knew we wouldn’t keep the slightly ugly headboard for long and would soon find ourselves back in the same conundrum.
Little dilemmas like this have become increasingly common, especially in the markets of North America and Europe. Many consumers claim to “shop with a conscience,” and a huge number of eco- and social-labeling programs have sprung up to assure them that factories, farms, forests, and fisheries around the world are in some sense “sustainable” or “fair.” One project to track eco-labels has found more than 450 different labels worldwide.1
Yet it is clear that consumers often abandon their ideals for low prices, and even conscientious consumers can be confused by the barrage of labels and misleading claims. Some labels are issued by independent initiatives with stringent standards, such as Fair Trade certification and the Forest Stewardship Council, but what lies “behind the label” is a far cry from what consumers imagine when they see images of a smiling coffee farmer or a green tree in a lush forest. What does it mean if consumers “vote with their pocketbooks” by choosing products that are labeled as “fair” or “sustainable”? Can global production processes really be transformed by standards that are voluntarily adopted by profit-seeking companies to please fickle consumers? As some people strive to be “conscientious consumers,” are they just fooling themselves, engaging in small acts of charity while ignoring larger structures of power and inequality that shape the lives of workers, citizens, and communities locally and globally? Is a consumerist logic of “one dollar, one vote” displacing the democratic principle of “one person, one vote?”
This book explores these dilemmas by looking at the links between consumption and production processes in global industries. Celebrations and critiques of “ethical consumption,” “political consumerism,” and the related issue of “corporate social responsibility” have abounded in the past decade. Yet rarely do these treatments look closely at the links between consumer markets, voluntary standards, and production processes in different industries and locations. We believe it is crucial to examine the dynamics of both consumption and production in order to understand if and when “shopping with a conscience” is likely to make a difference in global industries. Doing so has taken us not only into analyses of consumer behavior and market structures but also into footwear factories in China, sourcing offices in Hong Kong, smallholder farms in Paraguay, timber operations in Indonesia, electronics factories in Malaysia, activist organizations in the United States, and beyond. As a group, we have conducted more than four hundred interviews across four continents. We have talked with a variety of practitioners in the world of global standards, from managers responsible for making changes to auditors charged with judging compliance; from workers and smallholder farmers to the representatives of global brands and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). We have also analyzed a variety of data on consumers, firms, and industry dynamics. In this book we have sought to integrate a large amount of information into straightforward analyses and rich case studies.
Can consumers contribute to a fairer, more sustainable model of globalization? Should they, or is this a foolish way to bring about social change? These questions are central to the scholarly debate about what we call “conscientious consumerism”—that is, consumers viewing their purchases as a way to express some sense of ethical, or perhaps even political, responsibility. Some theorists have treated conscientious consumerism as an attractive and viable way for individuals to express their values, likening consumption to activism, political engagement, and active citizenship (Micheletti 2003). At a minimum, paying attention to how consumer products are made may enhance consumers’ sense of global connection and help to “de-fetishize” commodities (Seyfang 2005). Others have argued that conscientious consumerism is a shallow form of engagement that detracts from other pathways to social change; expresses parochial, self-serving values; and legitimates overconsumption (Guthman 2007a; Maniates 2001; Maniates and Meyer 2010; Szasz 2007). In between, some theorists have argued that individuals can be hybrid “citizen-consumers” whose consumer choices contribute in small ways to a broader sense of social and political engagement (Williams 2006; Willis and Schor 2012).
These debates are important, and we stake out our own position here, since any treatment of conscientious consumerism must grapple with its personal and political meanings. But by focusing almost exclusively on the culture, politics, and meanings of conscientious consumerism, existing research has had little to say about two key factors—(1) the structures of conscientious consumption and (2) its consequences at the point of production. First, consuming products labeled as “fair” or “sustainable” is not just a matter of individual “reflexivity,” regardless of whether one views this as noble or self-absorbed. It is structured by the constraints and opportunities that consumers face. This refers in part to factors such as income, education, and social class that make conscientious consumerism far from universal. But it also refers to differences across countries. Even among fairly affluent countries in North America and Europe, there are significant differences in the size and shape of markets for products whose labels claim they are fair or sustainable.
Second and even more striking is the degree to which the discourse on conscientious consumerism has sidestepped questions about the implementation of the standards that consumers are supporting. Many forms of conscientious consumption rely on assurances that certain production standards have been followed. Consumers cannot see for themselves whether their food has been farmed in a fair and sustainable way, whether their furniture originated in deforestation, or whether their smartphones are the product of heavily polluting high-tech sweatshops. But scholars of conscientious consumerism have failed to interrogate these standards and assurances. They usually either accept them at face value or dismiss them altogether as “greenwash” or “fairwash.” Other scholars have begun to study the implementation of voluntary production standards, typically in order to evaluate “private governance” systems (Locke 2013; Ponte 2008; Seidman 2007) or what some have called “transnational private regulation” (Bartley 2007b). But research on standards “on the ground” remains rare, and comparisons of different industries and locations are just beginning to emerge.
As one does look behind the label, this much is clear: claims of fairness and sustainability that seem straightforward to consumers become significantly murkier as one looks at the farms, factories, and forests where the products originate. Fair trade coffee may not be so fair for the casual laborers that farmers hire to toil in organic farms (Jaffee 2007).2 A decade of “corporate social responsibility” in the apparel industry did not prevent more than eleven hundred workers from dying when the Rana Plaza complex of factories in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013. Certified sustainable forests have sometimes turned out to be sites of illegal logging and violence against local residents. But it is also clear that not all assurances are the same. Some initiatives are more stringent and credible than others; some parts of an industry are more open to reform than others; and some places are more likely to support decent conditions than others. We find more variation and complexity in global industries than would be expected by either simplistic celebrations of corporate social responsibility or by condemnations of greenwash/fairwash. Our goal is to document, grapple with, and hopefully sort out some of that complexity.
The debate about conscientious consumerism is to some degree colored by the different terms that scholars have used to describe it. Some use the term “political consumerism” (Micheletti 2003), which has become the standard term for researchers in much of Europe. We believe it is premature to label shopping with a conscience as a political act, at least until far more is known about how consumers understand this act and its consequences. Others prefer the term “ethical consumerism,” which appears to be more common in British and American discourse (Barnett et al. 2005; Goodman, Maye, and Holloway 2010). But this seems to imply that consumers have a coherent ethical rationale. We use the term “conscientious consumerism” (and “conscientious consumption”) to reflect our view that concerned consumers are more often acting on a vague sense of trying to do good in the world than on a specific political or ethical commitment. This does not mean that conscientious consumption cannot be highly principled. In some cases it clearly is. But in many cases we suspect that consumers are uncertain and grasping—a reasonable response to the perplexing world of labels and global industries. And sometimes scholars question whether seemingly ethical purchases might actually be self-serving and insular (Szasz 2007). We see “conscientious” consumer activity as open to both more and less principled ethical/political commitments. Grappling with the pitfalls of this activity, in this book we argue that an overarching ideology of conscientious consumerism as a vision of social change is vacuous. Consumers and scholars should not rely on shopping to change the world. Nevertheless, we argue, specific practices of conscientious consumption can sometimes be meaningful as part of multifaceted strategies for reforming global industries. Careful attention is needed, then, to both consumer behavior and the effects of voluntary production standards.
In the remainder of this introduction we sketch our approach to the analysis of conscientious consumption and standards for global industries. We begin by discussing the processes through which claims of “fairness” and “sustainability” have become common features of shopping aisles. This includes some of the most significant changes in the global economy and polity over the past four decades, including the rise of global supply chains, transnational advocacy networks, and neoliberalism as an ideology of governance. We then move on to critique three common frames for understanding conscientious consumption and related global standards. This sets the stage for our own framework for analysis, which emphasizes industry structures, the constituencies behind standards, global-local linkages, and what we call the “puzzle of rules” in the global economy. Following this introductory chapter, we turn to an analysis of consumer behavior in the United States and Europe. This is followed by an attempt to unpack the dilemmas of conscientious consumerism—and our interpretation of what is harmful and helpful about it. Then, in part 2 of the book, we shift from consumption to production and develop case studies of four types of products: timber, food, apparel, and electronics. All have been subject to standards for “fair” or “sustainable” production, yet the results have rarely been what reformers hoped for.
The story usually begins with a social movement. While twentieth-century social movements often targeted national states and public policy, by the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental, labor, and human rights activists were also “shaming the corporation” and contesting markets directly. Often this meant exposing well-known transnational corporations’ complicity with exploitation of workers (especially young women), natural environments, and indigenous people in locations around the world. Anti-sweatshop groups “named and shamed” Nike, Walmart, H&M, and many other companies to draw attention to unsafe working environments; physical and verbal abuse; and a high-pressure, low-wage model of production in the apparel and footwear industry. Eventually this approach spread to the electronics industry as activists showed how Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, and others rely on harsh labor conditions in Asia as well as “conflict minerals” from war-torn areas of Central Africa. Environmentalists had long been targeting companies like The Home Depot, B&Q, and Mitsubishi because of their contributions to tropical deforestation, not to mention campaigns against Shell, Chevron, and other oil companies with reputations for pollution and environmental injustice. Food markets became especially politicized. Environmentalists showed how beef consumption threatened the Amazon rain forest, how seafood sales contributed to the depletion of species and destruction of ocean habitats, and how “factory farms” polluted local environments. They also raised concerns about pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the supply chains of many food brands and retailers. Human rights and development organizations linked Hershey, Nestlé, and others to bonded labor in cacao farms and connected Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Cargill (a large soybean producer) to land grabs that forcibly displaced small farmers in South America, Asia, and Africa.
In response, retailers and brands increasingly have adopted voluntary rules for their supply chains. Apparel, footwear, and electronics companies have adopted “ethical sourcing” policies and “codes of conduct,” sending auditors around the world to assess their suppliers’ compliance. Some have joined initiatives like Social Accountability International (SAI), the Fair Labor Association (FLA), Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), or the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), which have their own sets of rules and auditing procedures. Food producers and retailers have similarly joined initiatives like the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), both of which address the environmental and social implications of large-scale agricultural plantations. Sellers of paper and furniture have turned to products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) (or its competitor, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification [PEFC]) to demonstrate their green credentials, while some food retailers have agreed to sell seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. These are just a few examples of how pressure from social movements has led to the proliferation of ethical standards. Some of these standards take the form of policies that companies adopt, while others are governed by external associations, like those mentioned above. Typically these associations are created either by coalitions of NGOs and a few leading firms or by groups of companies hoping to fend off further pressure.
In some instances social movements have not merely pressured companies to improve their practices; they have sought to endorse alternative models of production. Organic agriculture was a movement before it was a market, and it helped to legitimate forms of farming that do not rely on pesticides. The fair trade movement originated with the goal of supporting small farmers who were organized into democratically run cooperatives, and it sought to use certification to direct greater resources toward these farmers, not to improve conditions on large plantations (Linton, Liou, and Shaw 2004). Although labor rights advocates have been hesitant to label companies as “good,” groups like the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Fair Wear Foundation (FWF) have begun to build market support for factories in which workers are represented by independent unions. Similarly, some of the impetus for the Forest Stewardship Council came from foresters, environmentalists, and indigenous rights groups hoping to support small-scale community forestry operations, not simply to improve industrial timber operations (Bartley and Smith 2010). These kinds of initiatives are “in the market but not of it” (Taylor 2005) and insert alternative “orders of worth” into market decisions (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Yet as activists have sought to build market support for these production models, they have encountered dilemmas of “mainstreaming” alternatives. Under pressure, larger companies have agreed to sell certified products, including Starbucks and Fair Trade coffee or The Home Depot and FSC-certified lumber. But as activists have discovered, there is a fine and often blurry line between building market support and becoming dependent on big companies in a way that leads to the weakening of standards.
As our case studies show, the world of voluntary standards, whether for alternatives or “best practices,” involves a constant struggle for the power to define legitimate standards and to determine how strictly they should be applied in the field. There is an “NGO-Industrial Complex” that underlies most conscientious consumption and production initiatives (Gereffi, Garcia-Johnson, and Sasser 2001), but it is multifaceted and contentious.
The ultimate impacts of conscientious consumption and production projects are often hard to discern, but this much is clear: taken together, these activities amount to a vast new set of standard-setting projects for the global economy. Promoted by a mix of NGOs, companies, and trade associations, they seek to use global production networks—or “global value chains”—rather than the national state to promote rules about fairness, justice, and sustainability (Cashore, Auld, and Newsom 2004; Guthman 2007b; Ponte 2008; Seidman 2007). “Lead firms” in these global value chains—that is, large retailers and brands from Apple to IKEA to Zara—have the power to set styles, prices, and delivery schedules for their suppliers, so, advocates argue, they should also be able to influence the conditions of workers, communities, and the environment. Companies frequently adopt standards to fend off activist pressure and the media spotlight, but adoption does not mean implementation. In some cases alternatives have found a niche in the market, and in other cases voluntary initiatives have proliferated while the logic of production—and exploitation—has remained largely unchanged.
Scrutiny of global industries has also spawned tools to help consumers make sense of all of these claims and to smartly vote with their wallets. Consumer Reports magazine can trace its origins to a much earlier wave of muckraking (Rao 1998), and with the recent proliferation of competing eco-labels it has sometimes stepped in to referee, as have publications from Co-Op America in the United States and Ethical Consumer magazine in the United Kingdom. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in the United States has long published a list of seafood for environmentally conscious consumers to prefer and avoid. Online guides and smartphone apps have made these types of guides more elaborate. Goodguide.com, developed by some leading researchers before being sold to Underwriters Laboratories (UL), compiles a wide array of information to rate products and companies for their health, environmental, and social impacts. Smartphone apps even allow consumers to trace products to parent companies and investors, as with apps that enable consumers to boycott the conservative Koch Brothers, avoid the biotech giant Monsanto, or support companies that recognize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual rights (O’Connor 2013).
Of course, these consumer guides are only as good as the information that goes into them, and as our case studies show, meaningful, accurate information is often difficult to come by in complex global industries. Furthermore, as our analyses of consumer behavior show, only particular subsets of consumers have indicated an interest in boycotting or “buycotting,” and there are real questions about how many will pay more for guarantees of fairness and sustainability. Before diving into these issues, we must consider the larger context in which the rise of conscientious consumerism has occurred.
Debates about consumers, producers, and ethical standards are vexing in part because they are tied up with a larger reconfiguration of responsibilities, rights, and rules in the global economy. National and multinational corporations have become transnational corporations with activities stretching across national boundaries without being deeply rooted in them. National states, once the main makers of rules and arbiters of rights, are increasingly just one of many actors issuing rules and claiming to enforce rights. International NGOs and global standards associations have sought to issue rules and enforce rights as well, although their effectiveness in doing so is unclear. More broadly, the goal to turn the world into “one big market”—associated with neoliberal ideology—has challenged earlier conceptions of what national states can and should do to protect or empower citizens, workers, and the environment. Conscientious consumption and production projects are to some degree the result of these changes. In a world of vertically integrated companies and strong, responsive states, there would be far less demand for voluntary standards supported by consumers. But these changes have not simply paved the way for conscientious consumerism; they have complicated its meanings and impacts in a variety of ways.
Capitalism in the twentieth century was characterized by the growth of vertically integrated corporations, which controlled raw materials, manufacturing, and distribution, and by the growth of horizontally integrated corporations and conglomerates, in which multiple businesses were combined in the same corporate structure. By the 1980s these models were giving way to the “supply chain revolution,” in which large firms contract with independent suppliers rather than owning an entire production process. Nike built its fortunes by being an early adopter of the “manufacturer without factories” model, and Walmart became a dominant retailer by making its supply chains work faster and cheaper than retailers had previously. In what Robert Feenstra (1998) called the “integration of trade and disintegration of production,” companies in industries from apparel to electronics to furniture shed their factories, contracted with independent manufacturers, and focused on building their “brand” images.
While some contracting and subcontracting happened within national borders, scholars pointed out that many production processes were being turned into “global commodity chains,” and especially “buyer-driven” global commodity chains, in which companies nearest the distribution end of the chain (retailers and well-known brands) exercised the greatest power over production processes and extracted the greatest profit from them (Gereffi 1994, 1999). Other terms, such as “global production networks” and “global value chains” described similar phenomena, and as many industries shifted to a supply chain model of some sort, these different traditions of research began to merge and more nuanced ways of describing power and coordination in global value chains were articulated (Bair 2008; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). This supply chain revolution was facilitated by technological changes that made contracting more efficient and by legal changes that opened more parts of the world to foreign investment. Of course, in some industries, such as agriculture, large, consumer-facing companies had long relied on networks of suppliers—from coffee farmers to growers of corn, wheat, and other commodity crops. Yet these industries have been reconfigured to some degree by the growth of mega-retailers that have cut out middleman distributors.
Most important at this point is to recognize how the supply chain revolution both highlighted and blurred the responsibilities of transnational corporations. On one hand, contracting and subcontracting networks tied retailers and brands in the United States and Europe to sites of production—and exploitation—around the world. To be sure, multinational corporations like Nestlé, ITT, and PepsiCo had been shamed for the actions of their foreign arms in the 1970s, but the networked transnational corporations of the 1990s had more extensive ties, and thus greater vulnerabilities. On the other hand, the lines of responsibility—and especially legal liability—were blurry, since brands and retailers exercised a great deal of power over their suppliers but did not own those sites of production. Initially when sweatshops, child labor, and prison labor were uncovered, brands like Nike and Walmart denied responsibility on the basis that they did not own the factories where such abuses occurred. As pressure mounted, these and other lead firms in global value chains began to accept “soft” forms of responsibility by adopting codes of conduct and pledging to monitor and improve conditions in their supply chains. Those same companies, however, fiercely resisted attempts to make them legally liable (Bartley 2005; Shamir 2004).
For the most part, this remains the situation in the forest products, food, apparel/footwear, and electronics industries. When pressed, retailers and brands have publicly accepted some responsibility to improve conditions in their supply chains, but their commitments are rarely binding. Suppliers are often allowed to slip by with tiny improvements, and retailers and brands can backtrack on their voluntary commitments when necessary. They may face other sanctions if they do so, such as loss of sales from conscientious consumers, delisting from socially responsible investment indexes, or additional social movement pressure, but even if this sort of pressure materializes, there is no guarantee it will bear enough force to effect real change. For better or worse, this is the terrain in which conscientious consumption and production projects operate.
To a great extent globalization has been a project to turn the world into “one big market,” not only by increasing countries’ openness to foreign investment and orientation to international trade but also by making it possible for firms and investors to operate more smoothly across borders than ever before. It is not just technology and the search for cheap labor and natural resources that has driven the globalization project; it is the ideology of neoliberalism. In its most basic form neoliberalism emphasizes the power of so-called free markets to improve well-being and to solve social problems. The focus of the neoliberal globalization project, then, is to keep states from interfering with global markets by convincing (or coercing) them to tear down barriers to foreign investment and reduce subsidies, tariffs, and “non-tariff barriers to trade,” such as regulations that discriminate against foreign firms. Of course, neoliberalism has its own tensions and contradictions. As Greta Krippner (2007) argues, governments often face a “neoliberal dilemma”: “Policymakers are anxious to escape responsibility for economic outcomes, and yet markets require regulation to function in capitalist economies. . . . [The result is] a continual process of institutional innovation in which functions are transferred to markets, but under the close control of the state” (478).
As this dilemma illustrates, the world is far from being a fully integrated “free market.” But many global value chains, including the ones studied here, do function as integrated “global factories” that depend on the smooth and integrated flow of inputs across national borders. Yet while these industries have a transnational scope, the structures for authoritatively regulating markets have remained largely national in scope, especially when it comes to issues of fairness and sustainability. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has endorsed protections for intellectual property rights, but it has left only narrow spaces for governments to protect workers and environments, and it has refused to address labor rights directly. Bilateral and multilateral trade agreements sometimes include labor and environmental standards, but these are limited in scope and enforceability. International organizations such as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization promote conventions for governments to adopt, but these organizations rarely have any power to demand enforcement. National governments are constrained in part by a global economy in which firms and investors can move from one jurisdiction to another but perhaps even more by ideological commitments to neoliberal globalization and the rules of the WTO (Evans 1997; Rodrik 2011). As we argue, it is a mistake to think that governments are powerless or irrelevant in the face of globalization, but there is no doubt that the dearth of binding international regulation of production conditions has led many to look to the private sector as a way of enforcing standards. NGOs, for instance, have often turned to voluntary standards and conscientious consumption as second-best alternatives to intergovernmental systems of regulation.
Neoliberalism can be credited not only with helping to hollow out the state but also with promoting an individualization of responsibility. In a process that theorists have called “responsibilization,” individuals are treated as having the duty and capacity to take responsibility for things that should rightly be seen as the result of social structures. This can be seen, for instance, in attempts to reform welfare states to make welfare recipients take responsibility for their own fates (Rose 2000). The moralization of markets has also been a responsibilization process, in which individual consumers are told they have the duty—and the ability—to solve the world’s social problems through their purchases. While some scholars use the language of responsibilization to dismiss conscientious consumption as misguided, we do not see this as the most appropriate response. We recognize that individual consumers are being asked to take responsibility for problems that would often be better served by more collective and robust solutions, including revitalized states and labor unions. But it is at least possible that responsibility-taking by consumers could help to support more durable solutions in the future, especially if governments, NGOs, and consumers themselves have a clearer understanding of what is and is not being affected by conscientious consumption and production initiatives.
Since the end of World War II, NGOs have become key actors in national, international, and transnational governance. By the turn of the twenty-first century, NGOs were carrying out most of the tasks of governing complex societies: delivering development assistance, mediating social conflicts, setting standards for business, developing expert knowledge, and reconstructing societies after natural and social disasters. By some accounts the proliferation of NGOs and their incorporation into development and governance projects amounts to an associational revolution that “may constitute as significant a social and political development of the latter twentieth century as the rise of the nation state was of the nineteenth century” (Edwards and Hulme 1996, 2).
International NGOs (INGOs), such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, or Human Rights Watch, have mobilized attention to a variety of global problems, from climate change to new forms of bonded labor. They have garnered media attention to these problems and have pushed governments and intergovernmental organizations to take action. In addition, the growth of transnational networks of advocates and experts has sometimes allowed domestic activists to gain leverage over their governments. In what Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) dubbed the “boomerang effect,” domestic activists can reach past indifferent or hostile domestic governments and appeal to transnational advocacy networks that in turn exert pressure on those governments.
Since the 1990s INGOs have increasingly sought to put pressure on transnational corporations and restructure markets, not just state policies. They have led efforts to build product certification initiatives, from the Forest Stewardship Council to the Marine Stewardship Council, and they have coordinated “market campaigns” to convince large retailers to support these initiatives. In addition, the traditional boomerang effect has been supplemented with what Naomi Klein (1999) called the “brand boomerang,” in which grassroots labor or environmental activists call on their international allies to put pressure on a well-known company that is operating in (or buying from) that location. Through these processes, INGOs have become important architects, advocates, and watchdogs of conscientious consumption and production projects.
The rise of INGOs does raise conundrums, however, especially about the relationship between professional advocates based in Amsterdam or Washington, D.C., and grassroots activists in developing countries. To some extent INGOs have become sensitive to these power disparities, and local NGOs have become savvy about working with foreign partners. But the power of INGOs to organize transnational campaigns, attract media attention, and shame global companies does carry the danger that more locally oriented strategies, or those directed to domestic governments, are being neglected (Seidman 2007).
Without the supply chain revolution, neoliberal globalization, and the growth of transnational advocacy networks, it is hard to imagine the rise of conscientious consumption and global standards for fairness and sustainability. Yet just because initiatives for auditing, certifying, or reporting on sustainability or fairness have emerged, that does not mean they will have integrity or impact. Typically, conscientious consumption and production projects are organized as private, voluntary initiatives. They attempt to set standards for markets, but they also exist within markets. Like all voluntary programs, they depend on participation from companies, and there can often be a trade-off between the stringency of standards and the number of participants (Potoski and Prakash 2009). All voluntary initiatives are structurally dependent on their corporate participants, so one should take the language of independent, “third-party” initiatives with a grain of salt. Furthermore, as private initiatives they have no monopoly on standards for a particular topic (as a government would have). This means competing standards initiatives can easily emerge. For some observers the private, voluntary character of these initiatives is reason enough to give up on them (e.g., Seidman 2007), while for neoliberal advocates of market-based solutions, these same features make such initiatives especially attractive. As we argue below, our approach seeks to unpack variation in the organization of these initiatives and the contexts in which they operate. At the same time, as our case studies show, there are certainly limits on what private, voluntary initiatives have been able to accomplish.
Given the rise of conscientious consumerism and the growth of standards for global industries, scholars and advocates are racing to promote simple frames for making sense of them. In this section we discuss three frames that are often invoked. Each captures a slice of something important, but each ends up obscuring as much as it illuminates, or more.
Scholars and advocates often adopt a celebratory tone in discussing conscientious consumerism. They argue that consumers are being empowered to “vote with their dollars” and that these small changes in the habits of affluent consumers can change, or even “save,” the world. As Ruth Stokes (2013) writes in the Ecologist magazine, “I believe that changing the way we shop—voting with our money—can help to change the world. . . . Companies respond to the habits of shoppers. We all have consumer power; we just have to make sure we use it wisely.” If consumers have been manipulated by companies in the past, they are increasingly being empowered by new sources of information, argues Dara O’Rourke (2011). Theorists of “political consumerism” have argued that this mode of political expression is especially empowering for individuals who are alienated from formal politics, such as young people and women (Micheletti 2003). Furthermore, as companies compete for the support of conscientious consumers and the coveted “lifestyles of health and sustainability” (LOHAS) niche (Emerich 2011), many observers argue that they will become transparent, responsible corporate citizens (Porter and Kramer 2006; Smith 1990; Zadek, Pruzan, and Evans 1997).
Such celebrations often rest on an idealized framing of consumer agency—that is, the ability and willingness of the “sovereign citizen-consumer” to be the prime mover of social change (Jacobsen and Dulsrud 2007). The “sovereign consumer” is an old concept that is intended to suggest that consumer tastes are the driver of all economic activity. As scholars have observed the growth of conscientious consumption, the sovereign consumer has become the sovereign citizen-consumer, or what Roberta Sassatelli (2007) dubbed the waking of the “sleepy giant of the sovereign citizen-consumer” (188). Social theorist Ulrich Beck, perhaps the most prominent theorist of consumption as a form of politics, argues that “citizens discover the act of shopping as one in which they can always cast their ballot—on a world scale, no less” (qtd. in Sassatelli 2007, 188). Michele Micheletti (2003) takes the provocation even further:
Conflicts over what and where to consume are now central for understanding the functioning of affluent Western societies. This can even mean that consumers participating in boycotts can, for instance, be likened to resistance fighters. Yet unlike resistance or revolutionary conflicts of the past, citizen-consumers tend to direct their attention toward the market rather than state actors. (16–17)
Even if one gets past the hyperbole, treating consumer tastes as king or queen is problematic in several respects. First, consumers’ attitudes turn out to be only one ingredient in the construction of conscientious consumption markets. As we show in this book, the opportunities for conscientious consumption are not distributed evenly across individuals or across countries. Social inequality and differences in market structures mean the social context of consumption is just as important as individual attitudes. Consumer tastes may make a difference, but it is difficult to see them as a true prime mover.
Second, it is naive to assume that a change in consumer tastes translates directly into a change in the production processes of global industries. As Margaret Willis and Juliet Schor (2012) argue, many accounts of conscientious consumerism take a “naïve aggregationist” approach to markets, assuming that if a large enough number of consumers is interested in alternative products, the market will simply change to deliver them. A quite different story is told by research on industries, technologies, and organizations over time. Production processes are often “locked in” by a system of interrelated technologies and expectations, making them difficult to change. Paul David (1985) famously illustrated this by considering the persistence of the inefficient QWERTY keyboard on typewriters and computers. Even if production practices are not strongly locked in, companies, like all organizations, rarely abandon their core routines and technologies (Hannan and Freeman 1989). Perhaps the biggest problem is that those who celebrate the transformative power of new consumer tastes assume that industry practices are changing, but they almost never actually investigate this assumption. The disconnect between theories of conscientious consumerism and empirical research on industry practices is stark, and it is one thing that we hope to remedy with this book.
Finally, by celebrating the empowered, conscientious, politicized consumer, one obscures the ways that unreflective consumer choices influence labor and environmental conditions in global industries. As much as some consumers are becoming more conscientious about some of their choices, especially when it comes to food and drinks (e.g., organic produce, fair trade coffee), much consumer activity is routine and habitual, and some of the ethics of consumption are opaque to all but the most committed individuals. Conscientious consumers might be careful to recycle, avoid disposable plastic water bottles, and buy organic vegetables, but then eat beef without thinking of its massive natural resource demands and the contributions of cattle production to global warming. As environmentalists have pointed out, encouraging consumers to make their purchases more environmentally friendly carries a risk of legitimating overconsumption in affluent markets, which is the foundation of many forms of environmental degradation (Maniates and Meyer 2010). The issue may not be just the amount of consumption but its pace as well. As will become clear later in this book, the rise of “fast fashion” and “fast electronics”—that is, the rapid churning through fashionable styles of clothing and different models of smartphones—appears to be a root cause of labor exploitation in the apparel and electronics industries.
While some have celebrated conscientious consumerism, others have dismissed voluntary standards, eco-labeling, and social labeling as “greenwash” or “fairwash.” As Sharon Beder (2001) puts it, “The attempt to provide a ‘green’ and caring image for a corporation is a public relations strategy aimed at promising reform and heading off demands for more substantial and fundamental changes and government intervention” (253). Claims about fair and sustainable production, in this view, simply provide cover to companies that are engaged in fundamentally unfair and unsustainable activities. The codes of conduct, sustainability reports, and information disclosures that are highlighted in celebratory accounts of transparency may actually be forms of “disinformation” that obscure companies’ actual practices.
The term “greenwash” took off among environmentalists in the late 1980s as a description of advertising campaigns that portrayed companies as protectors of the environment (Beers and Capellaro 1991). Greenpeace argued that transnational corporations like Shell, DuPont, and Mitsubishi had “embraced the environment as their cause and co-opted its terminology,” even while contributing massively to environmental degradation (Greenpeace 1992, 2). The analogue for corporate claims about incomes, livelihoods, and justice—“fairwashing”—entered the lexicon later, in the wake of the fair trade movement. As fair trade certification was becoming “mainstreamed” and imitated, scholars and activists began worrying that fairwashing was on the horizon (Conroy 2007; Lyon and Moberg 2010). Observers have also criticized the images produced in the name of “corporate social responsibility,” arguing that these are “merely a public relations game . . . lulling us into a false sense of security” (Doane 2005, 29). Common to all these diagnoses is the sense that most assurances one finds on a product are nothing more than public relations efforts.
The greenwash/fairwash critique captures two key features of conscientious consumption and global standards. First, when faced with criticism, companies would prefer to be able to improve their images without altering profitable practices. A public relations campaign is typically the first line of defense. Companies may also hire outside organizations—auditors, consultants, and sometimes NGOs—to lend some credibility to their campaigns. They may also fund seemingly independent standard-setting initiatives that can endorse their corporate social responsibility programs or label their products. As we will see, this is how the US timber industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative got its start, and it helps to account for the role of apparel and footwear brands in the Fair Labor Association. One must always take assurances of sustainability and fairness with a grain of salt. The dosage of salt depends in part on whether claims come from companies themselves, initiatives that they control, or more independent initiatives. (If initiatives depend on the voluntary participation of companies, they can never be fully independent, but there are gradations.) In our analyses of standards (in part 2 of this book), we are attentive to who has created a particular initiative, how it is funded, and how dependent on companies it is. Second, there is nearly always some hypocrisy present when companies take up greening or fairness initiatives. Simply because one product or one aspect of a company’s production has earned some credentials does not mean that the company’s operations overall can be considered green or fair. As David Vogel (2005) has argued, we often yearn for simple pronouncements of “good” and “bad” companies. But companies, like people, are complex, multifaceted, and often contradictory. One part of a company may be developing green production processes while another part lobbies against environmental regulation.
On the other hand, we see simple distinctions between greenwash/fairwash and “true” reform as a poor match for the current state of global industries and labeling projects. Eco-labeling and social labeling may once have been the domain of public relations personnel, but they have become their own specialized world, in which credibility depends on “multi-stakeholder representation” and extensive amounts of accreditation, auditing, and verification. Companies might prefer to respond to criticism with public relations campaigns, but they are often pushed by activists and investors to go further and achieve some kind of external assurance. For instance, if confronted by labor rights abuses, apparel and footwear companies no longer simply hold up a code of conduct; instead they refer to sophisticated factory monitoring programs, external certifications, and “capacity-building” projects (Locke 2013). Rather than simply co-opting the language of environmentalism, many retailers have been pushed to sell products that are independently certified (Conroy 2007). Furthermore, the world of voluntary certification has become increasingly formalized. For instance, to judge compliance with the standards of the FSC, an auditing organization (e.g., Scientific Certification Systems, SmartWood, or the Soil Association) must be accredited by a separate oversight body (Accreditation Services International). Furthermore, the FSC belongs to an umbrella organization—the ISEAL (International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling) Alliance—which defines best practices for credible certification initiatives. To be sure, all of this certification of the certifiers of the certifiers (and beyond) is not guaranteed to bring about meaningful improvement. Indeed, we describe cases where this formalization has been counterproductive and where seemingly credible initiatives have failed spectacularly. But it does mean there is more “checking” than there is simple “washing.” As Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister (2012) put it, “Corporate sustainability goals . . . include measurable targets, are audited by independent groups, and are integrated into the core business . . . [through] life-cycle assessment, supply chain tracing, eco-certification, and sustainability reporting” (38). We concur with them that all of this measurement and reporting often skirts the root causes of problems, but one cannot seriously assess conscientious consumption without investigating this activity. If the world were as simple as it was when the “greenwash” frame was first coined, a book like this would not be necessary.
Most importantly, the greenwash/fairwash frame leaves a key question unanswered: if a claim is not just greenwash/fairwash—in other words, if it is backed by stringent standards and credible verification processes—then what is it? It would be tempting to assume that the converse of greenwash/fairwash is something like “real sustainability/fairness” on the ground. But as our case studies show, it is possible to have stringent standards and credible assessment but still not generate much reform of global industries. Our goal is to provide some tools for making sense of these complex (and common) intermediate scenarios.
Another problematic frame concerns the implementation of global standards, including those supported by conscientious consumerism. It is tempting to see global standards as introducing new rules into otherwise empty spaces. For instance, one might think of labor codes of conduct as introducing labor rights into factories that would otherwise be completely unregulated and chaotic. Or one might think of global sustainability standards as introducing environmental norms into settings where businesses would otherwise be free to pollute with impunity. As Alison Brysk puts it, global rule-making projects often “concern areas previously ungoverned or even unknown” (Brysk 2005, 120). Indeed, scholars and practitioners often portray private rules as filling a “regulatory void” as they are put into practice, especially in developing countries (Sabel, O’Rourke, and Fung 2000). For some, developing countries are so lacking in the rule of law as to constitute “areas of limited statehood,” in which private rules must serve as a substitute for public authority (Börzel and Risse 2010). Sociologists in the “world society” school start from different assumptions but nevertheless argue that global norms about environmental protection, child labor, and human rights are imported into developing countries as novel concepts that are completely alien to the locals (Meyer et al. 1997).
The problem with this approach is not only, as Gay Seidman (2007) argues, that “stateless regulation” usually lacks enforcement power. A more fundamental problem is that this frame obscures the institutional arrangements that are in place in developing countries. Developing countries are not empty, anonymous, uniform places. They are populated with different business systems, cultures of production, and political institutions. What may look from afar like a relatively empty space turns out on closer inspection to have a dense set of preexisting relationships, organizations, and rules. These local circumstances can reconfigure global rules in myriad ways (Halliday and Carruthers 2009; Merry 2006). For instance, in chapter 4 we look at fair trade certification and its consequences in Paraguay, a place where earlier ways of organizing agricultural operations set the stage for fair trade projects and shaped their results. Fair trade standards were not simply imported to this setting, they were layered onto an existing set of institutions. In fact, a thicker “layering” of rules, with varying consequences, has been a common result of global standards (Bartley 2011). An “empty spaces” assumption also obscures ongoing political struggles at the point of production. As we will see, INGOs and conscientious consumers are far from the only actors concerned with labor rights, sustainability, or the fair distribution of resources. For instance, recent years have seen a rising tide of strikes in China and mobilization of garment workers in Cambodia and Bangladesh (Alam 2013; Dara and Willemyns 2014; Friedman 2013). The land rights of indigenous people in Brazil and Indonesia are a concern not only of backers of global sustainable forestry standards but also of burgeoning movements of indigenous people themselves (Gerber 2011). Social movements in developing countries may struggle to influence powerful global industries, but they cannot simply be ignored.
When it comes to governmental regulation, it is true that developing countries often lack the resources and administrative capacities to effectively regulate production processes, as do many governments in affluent countries. Moreover, the logic of global production in some ways gives them disincentives to do so: aggressively implementing regulations may cause investors—and orders from brands and retailers—to flee the country, and the rules of the WTO make some forms of regulation untenable. But “developing countries” are diverse. In nearly all parts of the world there are laws related to labor, the environment, and the rights of citizens. Scholars are beginning to find increased enforcement of these laws in some surprising places, from revitalized state labor inspection in the export processing zones of the Dominican Republic (Schrank 2013) to aggressive environmental regulators in Brazil and China (Coslovsky 2011; McAllister, Van Rooij, and Kagan 2010). In other instances, law can be repressive—restricting the rights of workers or indigenous communities, for instance (Lee 2007; Li 2010). Again, the influences of local structures can vary, but one should not assume a blank slate.
How, then, can one make sense of projects to promote conscientious consumption and fair or sustainable production? The first step is simply to accept that there is a great deal of variation. There is variation across individuals and locations in conscientious consumer behavior. There is variation across products and labeling initiatives in the “on the ground” implications of global standards. There is variation across industries (and even within them) in systems of production, and these intersect with national (and even subnational) differences in industry organization. To understand whether conscientious consumption and fair/sustainable production projects can contribute to meaningful alternatives, we must look closely at these industrial and political contexts. A second starting point is to accept that the influence of global standards for fair/sustainable production is typically highly circumscribed or contingent on other factors. As will become clear, even the most stringent standards and most credible initiatives do not transform global industries. They sometimes influence certain parts of an industry, but even this cannot automatically be assumed.
To unpack conscientious consumption initiatives and the global standards they endorse, we bring four factors to the foreground: (1) structures of production and consumption, (2) the constituencies of standards, (3) global-local linkages, and (4) the coexistence of rule making and unruliness.
Industry structures shape both the opportunities for conscientious consumption to occur and the consequences of rule-making projects at the point of production. To start, some industries are more likely than others to become targets of activism, which is typically the catalyst for rule-making and conscientious consumption projects.
Lead firms in global value chains, especially when they are large and have salient corporate reputations, make attractive targets for social movements (Bartley and Child 2014). Industries that lack powerful and well-known brands tend to attract less scrutiny. For instance, the manufacturing of bricks, especially in developing countries, is often a highly polluting and exploitative industry. But because there are not well-known global brands in this industry, it has received little international attention. In other cases activists have highlighted a problem, but without powerful and recognizable brands to link this to, rule-making projects have not emerged. The production of cheap costume jewelry is rife with exploitation, as shown in the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China, but this has not become a site of extensive rule making and conscientious consumerism. In some circumstances the existence of large, high-profile retailers can compensate for a more fragmented or poorly known set of manufacturers. Anti-GMO activists, for instance, have pressured manufacturers like Monsanto by going through large retailers like Marks & Spencer (Schurman and Munro 2009). Our analysis of global food distribution (in chapter 4) is consistent with this observation, but it also suggests that the locus of consumer and activist pressure depends on the specific product.
When activists do press lead firms to make their supply chains fairer or more sustainable, the consequences seem to depend in part on the structure of that supply chain. If suppliers can easily find alternative buyers who are not demanding changes—that is, if there are few suppliers and many buyers—they will have little incentive to comply with a particular lead firm’s rules. Going further, by many accounts, when lead firms have a great deal of power over “captive” suppliers, they should be able to demand that those suppliers make improvements (Mayer and Gereffi 2010). On the other hand, some research has questioned whether this power is truly effective or whether it merely spurs a game in which suppliers pretend to be making improvements (and lead firms nod in approval) (Locke, Amengual, and Mangla 2009). We suspect that the power of lead firms does make a difference but that more significant changes are possible when lead firms and suppliers are mutually dependent and work together over long stretches of time. (Our analysis of the apparel industry in chapter 5, though, suggests that long-term collaboration is rare.) In addition, when global value chains are fairly simple in their structure, without too many intermediaries, this should make it easier for standards to “travel” through them. There is a conundrum here, however, since it is often in industries with a high degree of subcontracting (such as apparel) that global standards are in the highest demand. If global industries were dominated by vertically integrated firms rather than dispersed supply chains, the world of conscientious consumerism would look quite different. Furthermore, sometimes the lack of action by large lead firms can leave a space for activists and entrepreneurs to carve out a small market niche based on fairness or sustainability. This is how fair trade–certified coffee began, and some new projects appear to be emerging in electronics (Fairphone, as discussed in chapter 6) and apparel (the Alta Gracia factory, as discussed in chapter 5). After looking more closely at our four industries—timber, food, apparel/footwear, and electronics—we return to questions about industry structure in the book’s conclusion.
Industry structures also matter for consumers. As we show in the next chapter, opportunities to engage in conscientious consumption are just as important as motivations to do so, and these opportunities depend in part on the structure of the retail sector in a particular country. Generally we suggest that having larger retailers will facilitate consumer purchases of eco- and social-labeled products. In part this is simply because larger retailers offer a wider array of choices overall—that is, different versions of the same product—while smaller retailers offer fewer choices. To be sure, small stores can specialize in “alternative” products and large stores can fail to carry them. But given the trend toward “mainstreaming” of alternatives (see Jaffee 2012), large retailers have become key points of sale for eco- and social-labeled products. Furthermore, oligopoly in the retail sector—the dominance of a small number of large companies—also seems to magnify the power of activists to influence the market. As Rachel Schurman and William Munro (2009) found, the existence of a small number of large food retailer chains in the UK allowed the anti-GMO movement to flourish there while it foundered amid the larger number of supermarket chains in the United States.
Global standards for fairness and sustainability may sound universal, but they spring from the priorities of particular individuals and groups. A crucial step in understanding these standards is to examine the founders of initiatives that make rules, audit compliance, and certify products as fair or sustainable. Some such initiatives, such as fair trade certification, originated largely with NGOs or others outside of the industry. Others, such as the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, were founded almost exclusively by industry associations or other groups of companies, often in response to the actions of NGOs. In between are a number of initiatives developed by coalitions of NGOs and companies, from the Forest Stewardship Council to Social Accountability International. Founders are not everything. NGO-initiated programs can become watered down as they are mainstreamed, and industry-initiated programs often evolve into formally independent organizations. Most programs seek credibility by calling themselves “multi-stakeholder” initiatives. We maintain, however, that founding constituencies leave deep imprints on the content of standards and on the distribution of power within rule-making initiatives. Rules can get ratcheted up or down over time, but these are usually marginal revisions to a core approach. Furthermore, even when initiatives become formally independent from the constituencies that created them, informal ties, revolving doors, and financial contributions often persist.
Generally we expect that industry-initiated programs will have standards that depart in relatively small ways from the normal practices of the industry. Companies may want to improve labor conditions or environmental performance of their suppliers, but they will be loath to push so far as to disrupt production or force a major change in their sourcing practices. As a result, the greater the influence of companies in the founding of an initiative, the more likely it is to use either a “best in class” approach or a “continuous improvement” approach. In the first, companies are recognized (through certification or other endorsement) for demonstrating that they are above average in their industry. This often skirts the issue of whether they meet a stringent definition of a fixed standard. As Scott Nova (2011) has noted, a “best in class” model is like grading on a curve, even if average performance is quite low. The second approach allows companies to start with a relatively lax standard and encourage gradual improvement over time.3
When industry outsiders have power in the initial design, standard-setting initiatives should look somewhat different. First, their standards are likely to depart more substantially from normal practices in the industry, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the power of these outsiders. Second, these initiatives are more likely, though certainly not guaranteed, to endorse an alternative model of production rather than to just reward the best in class or push for continuous improvement. Fair trade certification and its emphasis on democratically managed producer cooperatives (as described in chapter 4) is the clearest example of this. Third, and because of this, initiatives spawned by outsiders are likely to either remain small or face dilemmas of mainstreaming as they grow. If they seek a large market presence, “alternative” programs will inevitably become more dependent on large companies. The result may be a watering down of standards, although as the case of the FSC shows (in chapter 3), this can be counteracted to some degree.
For most products there are multiple competing attempts to define fairness and sustainability. For instance, there are several ways of certifying the fairness and sustainability of coffee or of assessing the labor conditions of apparel companies.4 Usually this competition reflects the struggle between companies and NGOs. Some scholars believe that such competition dooms voluntary initiatives, since it confuses consumers and lets companies choose their own standards (Seidman 2007). Others believe that it strengthens governance by spurring a “ratcheting up” of expectations (Sabel, O’Rourke, and Fung 2000). Our analysis of four global industries suggests that different sets of standards can often coexist, not exactly peacefully, but with moderate interaction or in different market niches. Competition is inevitable, but it seems to neither doom nor guarantee meaningful standards for fairness and sustainability. It must be noted that initiatives that began with high bars—namely, Fair Trade and the FSC—have not been pushed out of the market by their competitors.
Specifying links between “the global” and “the local” has proven difficult, and scholars have often fallen prey to two types of conceptual dangers. First, in focusing on the global diffusion of a given idea or norm, some have portrayed domestic settings as little more than passive receivers of a global project. The language of domestic settings as “receptor sites” for global models (Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000) is one example of this. Pinpointing this problem, researchers are increasingly focusing on how local actors appropriate and “indigenize” global models to make them useful or meaningful (Halliday and Carruthers 2009; Merry 2006). Second, scholars of globalization often equate the global with universalism (and often progress) and the local with particularism (and often backwardness). In so doing, scholars uncritically accept the most dominant model as “the global” and obscure the power that was exercised to establish its dominance.
To deal with these problems, we adopt Bonaventura de Santos’s language of “globalized localisms” and “localized globalisms” (Santos 2006; Santos and Rodríguez Garavito 2005). The first refers to a process in which a particularistic set of ideas and practices becomes a dominant global norm. Santos (2006) provides examples such as “the transformation of the English language into a lingua franca, the globalization of American fast food or popular music or the worldwide adoption of the same laws of intellectual ownership, patents, or telecommunications aggressively promoted by the USA” (396). For our purpose the key issue is how particular understandings of rights, rules, and enforcement have become institutionalized as global norms. Concretely, the notion of a “globalized localism” sensitizes us to processes by which particular sets of reformers (NGOs, companies, or others) have turned their projects into “global” standards for fairness and sustainability. Our point is not to join the chorus that argues that “Western” standards are being illegitimately forced on people and companies elsewhere. There have long been calls for decent work and responsible natural resource management in many different parts of the world. But the global standards supported by conscientious consumers in North America and Europe embody particular approaches to these issues.
The second concept, “localized globalism,” refers to the incorporation of these global models into local routines and expectations. The concept sensitizes us to the work involved in turning global standards for fairness and sustainability into a concrete practice in a factory, forest, or farm in some particular location. As we have noted, scholars too often portray these sites as empty spaces. We believe it is preferable to start from the opposite premise: that sites of implementation are crowded with different actors and agendas, only some of which are likely to line up with global standard-setting initiatives. Some elements of global standards are easily incorporated into local practices while others are fiercely resisted. But a recognition of localized globalisms also has methodological implications. It is rare for researchers to actually study these locations in detail. It is easier to conduct distant and decontextualized studies of CSR or to focus only on the creation of standards rather than their local implementation. Our analyses of the global timber, agricultural, apparel, and electronics industries include attention to specific locations, from the sugarcane farms of Paraguay to the electronics factories of Malaysia.
One can better understand conscientious consumption and production projects by recognizing what Tim Bartley (2014a) has called the “puzzle of rules” in the global economy: simply put, global capitalism can be “unruly,” but it also generates many rule-making projects.
The expansion of global markets has facilitated a number of rule-making projects, from the standardization of accounting procedures to the rules for fairness and sustainability discussed in this book. The volume of rule making by both public and private actors has increased over the past three decades. Many scholars have pointed to these trends as evidence that global capitalism is not manic or ungovernable as it was initially framed. Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson (2006) argue that “the proliferation of regulatory activities, actors, networks or constellations leads to an explosion of rules and to the profound re-ordering of our world” (1), and they see global capitalism as “marked by more—not less—rule-making activity” (376).
On the other hand, the explosion of rule making has often been geared toward the expansion of markets rather than their restriction, and in many respects global capitalism has remained unruly. In many industries investment and orders can and do move quickly across locations, often undermining attempts to impose rules. Even more socially controlled European varieties of capitalism have had their foundations chipped away (Streeck 2009). Furthermore, for all of the efforts of NGOs to build rules for fairness, sustainability, and human rights, many corners of global industries remain largely unscrutinized and unaffected by these rule-making projects.
As our case studies illustrate, even as standards for fairness and sustainability have risen to prominence, global industries have remained volatile and exploitative. Certification of sustainable forestry rose to prominence from 1995 to 2010, but so did illegal logging, and deforestation worsened in many places. The global apparel industry has come to be governed by numerous codes of conduct and factory monitoring initiatives, but it has also continued to move quickly from one location to another in search of low wages and more docile workers. The rapid and inconsistent pace of the global electronics industry has undermined attempts to improve working conditions, while rapidly changing agricultural markets have threatened the livelihoods of many smallholder farmers.
The puzzle of rules can be solved through an analysis of neoliberalism (see Bartley 2014a), but it also provokes a simple conclusion about the prospects for global fairness and sustainability: global industries often have contradictory tendencies, so we should not expect either complete “greenwash”/“fairwash” or serious transformation. Fair trade certification has not transformed the logic of commodity trade, but it has improved conditions for some farmers in some circumstances. FSC certification has not made the timber trade sustainable, but it has supported improvements in some forests. As we develop these findings (in part 2 of the book), we hope to speak not only to scholars of conscientious consumerism but also to citizens and consumers themselves. Consumers often want to feel like their purchases are “clean” of exploitation, but this is unrealistic. We believe it would be more promising if consumers shifted from a deterministic to a probabilistic approach: conscientious consumption may increase one’s probability of contributing to improvements and decrease the probability of contributing to the most extreme forms of exploitation. This does not answer the question of how large those probabilities are (which surely varies by product and label) or the question of how significant those improvements can be. But only if consumers shift from an all-or-nothing view of “clean” versus “dirty” production (that is, sustainable versus destructive, fair versus exploitative) can they come to an accurate understanding of what their purchases can and cannot achieve.
Part 1 of this book focuses on dynamics and dilemmas of conscientious consumerism. In chapter 1 we look at why some American and European consumers are more likely than others to practice conscientious consumption. Using survey data on thousands of individual consumers, our quantitative analyses focus on factors that shape two forms of conscientious consumption: boycotting and “buycotting”—that is, preferring a product for some political or ethical reason. Some patterns are related to consumers’ beliefs and the extent to which they can afford to be choosy. But individual differences are only a small part of the story. Where consumers are has a great deal to do with whether they engage in conscientious consumption or not. We therefore connect the individual survey responses with measures that capture national economic, political, and cultural contexts. Overall, this initial portrait shows that conscientious consumption is widespread but far from universal, with key differences rooted not only in individual characteristics but in different structures of consumption as well.
Having sketched some general patterns, we delve deeper into the meanings and implications of conscientious consumerism in chapter 2. Our analyses in chapter 1 are based on what consumers say they do, but there are reasons to doubt that consumers will follow through on what they say, or that what they say truly captures the social meaning of their actions. Yet we show that there is evidence of consumers being willing to pay for eco-labels and social labels. Consumers are most likely to do so when their “ethical” choices also serve their self-interest, such as saving on energy costs or eating safer, healthier foods. But even for those forms of conscientious consumption that have no short-term, direct benefit for consumers, there is mounting evidence that some consumers will pay more. For labeling enthusiasts this is a good thing. But the “one dollar, one vote” logic of conscientious consumerism and the status-symbol character of some “ethical” products are potentially dangerous in that they can exacerbate social, economic, and political inequalities among consumers. Moreover, there is a danger that conscientious consumerism can displace other forms of political engagement, promoting individual consumerism at the expense of democratic citizenship and collective social movements. Working through these debates, we argue that conscientious consumerism as an ideology is regressive and counterproductive, but specific practices of conscientious consumption can sometimes be consistent with other forms of political engagement.
Of course, the real test of conscientious consumption comes at the point of production. To what extent do voluntary standards forged in response to consumer concern make a difference “on the ground” in global industries? We tackle this question in part 2 of the book by looking at the global production of four types of products—(1) wood and paper products, (2) food (especially the agri-food industry), (3) apparel and footwear, and (4) electronics. Each of these case studies is rooted in the interviews that we have conducted with local actors and other fine-grained information on the organization of production. These chapters apply the framework sketched above (and a common organizational template) to allow for comparative insights.
Chapter 3 looks at the rise of forest certification and its effects in the global timber industry. Like fair trade, the FSC is one of the oldest and most established certification and labeling initiatives. It was founded more than twenty years ago, and it spurred a number of imitators and competitors. Yet it is not well known among conscientious consumers, and its impacts have been far less than originally intended. We trace the rise of forest certification, with particular attention to the founders and constituents of the FSC and how they leveraged the structure of the forest products industry to “make a market” for certified wood and paper. Yet applying sustainability standards to the production of some wood and paper products has barely influenced global deforestation. A closer look at FSC certification in the tropical forests of Indonesia illustrates both the contradictions of certifying in a shifting and contentious context and the limited ability of forest certification to influence the main drivers of deforestation.
Next, in chapter 4 we turn to agricultural production and the fairness and sustainability projects that have emerged in this setting. Consumers attach a variety of meanings to food, and the politics of food consumption has exploded in the past decade. In addition to sketching the structure of agri-food production and consumption in general, we focus on two types of rule-making projects: fair trade certification and an increasingly popular “commodity roundtable” approach. Looking more closely at two crops—sugar and soy—in one country, Paraguay, we are able to illustrate the consequences of different models of certification and the crucial role of local context. Global food politics are being layered onto preexisting institutional arrangements, and it is largely these institutional arrangements that determine whether certification is meaningful or not. For instance, fair trade certification seems to matter most when smallholder farmers are already organized into democratically effective cooperatives or when local organizing allows them to upgrade their production capacities over time. The contingent effects of conscientious consumption come into focus in this chapter.
Chapter 5 considers how the rise of anti-sweatshop activism in the early 1990s led to various attempts to monitor and improve working conditions in apparel and footwear factories. A rough indication of how these initiatives have fared is provided by the occurrence of factory fires in 2010–2013 and the death of more than eleven hundred garment workers in the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh. Our chapter examines the constituencies behind different factory auditing and certification initiatives, the ways standards were implemented, and the reasons why their effects have been minimal. The structure of apparel and footwear production in many ways created the demand for codes of conduct, but the structure and the mobility of the industry have undermined meaningful improvements. Looking more closely at factories in China, we show how attempts to certify particular factories have fallen short. In recent years several new projects to provide ethical apparel have emerged, but there remain few credible alternatives in this industry.
Finally, chapter 6 takes us into the fast-paced world of the electronics industry, where companies produce new models of smartphones, laptops, and other devices at breakneck speed. Yet recently this industry has become a focus of attention for the exploitation of production workers, especially after a series of worker suicides (and later strikes) at Foxconn factories in China and mounting scrutiny of Foxconn’s buyer, Apple. Electronics brands have also been accused of using “conflict minerals” in the production of smartphones. The electronics industry is populated by well-capitalized companies that at times have demonstrated good intentions to make the labor process safer and more humane. Yet the industry has struggled to make improvements and find tenable solutions. We argue that the solution to this puzzle lies in the architecture of production and, to a large extent, ultimately in the organization of electronics consumption. This is a case in which conscientious consumerism has been slow to develop, and unreflective consumerism has been a powerful constraint on significant improvement. Using detailed data on factories producing for Hewlett-Packard, we show how the industry continues to demand extraordinarily “flexible” labor markets and excessive working hours in its factories in Southeast Asia.
We have tried to provide a sense of the complexity of these cases and settings while still drawing out clear implications. Along the way readers should get a clearer sense of the structure and operation of global value chains, the varied geographies of production, and the circumscribed consequences of eco-labels and social labels. In a concluding chapter we compare our four sets of products and consider what has been learned.