Exploitation, Corporate Responsibility, or State Regulation? A New Study on Public Perceptions of Global Supply Chains

Washington, DC—The pandemic has contributed to an increased awareness of global supply chains. In addition to concerns about disruptions and bottlenecks, people are increasingly concerned about labor exploitation and environmental degradation in the making of consumer products. But how do people in the U.S. decide what counts as objectionable and what can be dismissed as distant, negligible, or the normal working of the market?

Previous research into perceptions of globalization generally has focused on appreciation or antipathy toward international trade, but the current state of global production raises new questions. Specifically, how are the moral boundaries of markets judged when what is objectionable or harmful is geographically distant, supply chains are fragmented, and people face competing claims about how severe these harms are—and who should bear responsibility for addressing them?

In their new study “Global Markets, Corporate Assurances, and the Legitimacy of State Intervention: Perceptions of Distant Labor and Environmental Problems,” appearing in the June  2022 issue of American Sociological Review, authors Matthew Amengual, Associate Professor in International Business at the University of Oxford, and Tim Bartley, Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and Senior Lecturer at Stockholm University, seek answers to these questions, which can help make sense of the current moment in which global supply chains are increasingly politicized.

Using survey data, the authors seek to explain what makes people in the U.S. see market restriction by the state as important for combatting environmental degradation and labor exploitation in global supply chains. Over the last decade, national governments have become more interventionist when it comes to global supply chains, and, in some cases, they have even banned the sale of products linked to human rights or environmental abuses.

The U.S. government, for instance, has blocked the import of products made with forced labor in Malaysia, China, and other locations, including fishing boats linked to “modern slavery.” The federal government has also blocked the sale of items traceable to illegal logging in Russia, Peru, and elsewhere, and some legislators are now proposing an expanded ban to address deforestation in the Amazon. Yet, the legitimacy of this kind of government intervention continues to be questioned—especially given politically polarized perceptions of evidence and questions about corporations’ ability to address these problems through voluntary measures.

Using a national sample of 4,489 adults designed to approximate the U.S. population in terms of region, age, gender, income, and education, the authors conducted a conjoint survey experiment online from mid-February to early March 2020. The authors constructed thousands of “scenarios that approximate the noisy way information about problems, advocacy frames, and corporate promises are ordinarily conveyed in news reports.” Each scenario consisted of information on (1) a product made through global supply chains and consumed in the United States, (2) a labor or environmental problem, (3) a statement from an advocacy group, (4) a statement from companies in the industry, and (5) a description of which companies made this statement. These elements were randomly combined, allowing the researchers to estimate the influence of each element on respondents’ views of state intervention.

Looking at popular judgements about state intervention, Amengual and Bartley’s study reveals widespread assumptions about responsibility and regulation. First, the authors found clear evidence that corporate assurances of private regulation make state intervention seem less important.

In comparison, the effects of advocacy frames are inconsistent. “Advocacy frames emphasizing corporate greed, and (less consistently) scientific evidence, do increase the perceived importance of state intervention, but other advocacy frames have more mixed effects, and none are effective for political conservatives—who reacted negatively to being told that greater state involvement is the solution.”

Finally, corporate messages resonate more clearly, “but only when they assure the audience that relevant reforms are occurring.” Corporate messaging around ethics, charity, and community does not decrease support for state intervention. Additionally, while corporations may find concrete assurances of reform to be more risky, they are also more potent in the public imagination.

So, why is so much credence given to corporate assurances? The authors suggest one strong possibility is that “corporations have gained a kind of symbolic capital in the common sense of moralized global markets that elevates their assurances even in the absence of trust… Observers may pragmatically want someone to address distant problems—and see corporations as well-positioned to do this.”

The research also reveals that Americans’ views of the legitimacy of state intervention are strongly influenced by the problem at hand. Vignettes that included child labor or the emission of toxic chemicals, for example, produced more support for government-imposed bans than those that included wage theft or overuse of natural resources.

Understanding these popular judgements is important because public opinion is a resource for activists and policy reformers. The authors find a substantial pool of support for state intervention to address distant labor and environmental problems. However, they also find that, as corporations provide assurances of voluntary reform to the public, support for state intervention declines across the political spectrum. This finding suggests that if reformers want to strengthen government regulation of the global economy, they will need to either neutralize corporate assurances so that they are perceived as being purely symbolic or transform corporate action into a more meaningful form of regulation.

The authors suggest future research should assess whether the credence given to corporate assurances depends more on trust in business or pragmatic deference to position and how public judgements influence the likelihood of concrete reform projects to effectively regulate global supply chains.

For more information and for a copy of the study, contact [email protected].

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