Sustainability Controls as Technologies of Actorhood: Constructing the Responsible Supplier in Global Supply Chains Le contrôle de la durabilité comme technologie d'actorialité : façonner le fournisseur responsable dans les chaînes d'approvisionnement mondiales

Abstract

This paper examines how accounting and control practices constitute and distribute agency and responsibility for sustainability in global supply chains. Drawing on a field study in the fashion industry, we describe the sustainability control practices used by a major buyer firm vis-à-vis its suppliers and trace their evolution from a “compliance-based” to a more “collaborative” regime. We find that these controls did not simply guide, monitor, or assess supplier firms; they responsibilized them in a more fundamental sense, namely by virtue of scripting the suppliers' actorhood. We show how such scripting evolved in ways that enabled the buyer to progressively distance itself from certain sustainability and control problems, as emergent controls produced the legitimate supplier as an actor who can, and should, address sustainability in an increasingly autonomous and entrepreneurial manner. A key argument that we therefore develop is that sustainability control practices operate as technologies of actorhood that not only address sustainability problems but also redistribute locales of moral authority and responsibility in interorganizational settings—not only among actors but also into the invisible hand of the market. We further show how such constitution of organizational actorhood relies on, and triggers, processes of subjectivation at the individual level, as members come to embody their organization's imagined actorhood.