‘Social compliance decoupling cascades’ in global supply chains: A review of the implementation of labour codes

Across global supply chains, buyers enforce labour codes as a primary mechanism for ensuring suppliers’ social compliance with international labour standards and rights for workers in supplier facilities. Yet researchers have long documented empirical evidence of the inconsistent, weak implementation of labour codes. Therefore, the effective use of this social compliance mechanism requires examining what causes supply chain actors to exhibit failures in substantively implementing labour codes, or ‘social compliance decoupling’. We conducted the first systematic review of all available empirical evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, on the implementation of labour codes by actors at different stages of the supply chain, to identify and catalogue the root causes of social compliance decoupling. By integrating our findings, we propose a conceptual framework on ‘social compliance decoupling cascades’ that illustrates the causes of social compliance decoupling by supply chain actors at different stages and explains three pathways through which decoupling by an actor translates into decoupling by one or more adjacent actors (‘rewards–rights trade-off’, ‘compliance capital scarcity’ and ‘code acontextuality’). We recommend opportunities for research and best practice around the recoupling of social compliance through multi-stakeholder collaboration, mutual investment, relational sourcing and expansion of the scope of global supply chain social responsibility to drive effective labour code implementation.