Exit, Voice, Loyalty and Cynicism: Factory Workers’ Response to CSR Decoupling in Garment Supply Chains
In this session of the International Business Seminar Series, Prof. Dr. Valentina Carbone examined how supply chain workers navigate substandard labor conditions caused by CSR decoupling. Drawing on interviews from Vietnam’s garment industry, she introduced a dynamic framework based on Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty model to explain when workers comply or resist. The presented study highlights the overlooked agency of factory-level workers and calls for a more human-centered approach to sustainable supply chain management.
Prof. Carbone’s study examines the paradoxical portrayal of supply chain workers in the literature as passive and obedient while also complicit or rebellious in the face of substandard working conditions in supplier facilities. Specifically, it examines workers’ response to poor labor conditions caused by CSR decoupling — the gaps between the formal policies to which suppliers commit themselves and actual factory-floor practices.
Drawing from 40 interviews in Vietnam’s garment industry and building on Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework and its extensions, the Prof. Valentina Carbone and her co-authors develop a dynamic framework of when and how workers respond to decoupled practices.
The article contributes to three key areas of research. First, it elucidates workers’ role in both accepting and resisting CSR decoupling, advancing the literature on CSR decoupling in global supply chains, which has traditionally focused on buyers or suppliers. Second, it responds to calls for humanizing the sustainable supply chain management literature by highlighting factory-level workers and the value of studying less powerful actors. Third, it extends and adapts Hirschman’s model to supply chain contexts and their unique dynamics. The findings also provide relevant guidance for policymakers and practitioners, demonstrating the need to strengthen worker voice through a multipronged approach.
Valentina Carbone is Professor of sustainability and supply chain management at ESCP Business School, Paris campus. She is the scientific director of the Phd Programme.
In her research, she deals with inter-organisational and collective dynamics in global value chains and contemporary grand challenges, with a particular focus on how multi stakeholder initiatives (such as RSPO) or new production and consumption models (such as sharing and circular economy) contribute to addressing environmental and social sustainability challenges.
Her research has been financed by public sector bodies such as the European Commission or the French Ministry for Sustainable Development. It has been published in major international journals belonging to the supply chain and the sustainability fields.
She established and co-directed the Chair on Circular Economy; she is responsible for the Sustainability Rethink specialisation track and for an online Sustainability Management course for all the MSc Students at ESCP.
Valentina is in charge of a monthly web-show on environmental issues in supply chains, in French. She serves on the Board of Directors of HOP, an NGO fighting against planned obsolescence.