Structure and Context: A Multi-Level Approach to Supply Chain Governance

The structure and governance of global supply chains not only shape social and environmental outcomes for both countries and firms, but also affect the quality of life at the local level, for those who live and work at each site of production. Existing literature on supply chain governance focuses on the transnational firm and has yielded a wide range of theoretical and empirical findings about firm- and nation-level outcomes. However, we know less about the drivers of variation in more localized social and environmental outcomes across production sites, which may result from local, national, and global actors and institutions that may interact. I provide a brief overview of the dominant literature on supply chain governance, highlighting the tendency to take an actor-centric approach. I then identify opportunities to study local social and environmental consequences of networked production using a more explicitly multi-actor and multi-level approach that can allow us to identify potential trade-offs, double wins, or spillovers between social and environmental outcomes.