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Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access published online on May 4, 2007
Journal of Economic Geography, doi:10.1093/jeg/lbm011
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK–US comparison of retailers’ ethical trading initiatives

Alex Hughes*,{dagger}, Martin Buttle* and Neil Wrigley**

*School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK.
**School of Geography, University of Southampton, UK.

{dagger}Corresponding author. Alex Hughes, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. email < Alex.Hughes{at}ncl.ac.uk>

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sites of production, has become a key means through which labour in retailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedly in their approaches to ethical trade and that such variation is shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts in which retailers are based. This article explores this insight by evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholder initiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK's core multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takes a developmental and continuous learning approach to ethical trade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed more on corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusively in the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attempts to foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives, though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutional contexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches are fluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governance of global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibility by emphasising the political significance of national-institutional environments. However, in line with notions of relational economic geography, we understand these national-institutional environments as active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitional ways in which nationally based organisations evolve in their home countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendas for ethical trade.

Keywords: ethical trade, retailers, corporate responsibility, multi-stakeholder organisations,
JEL classifications: F10, F23, J80, L30, L81
Date submitted: 4 December 2006     Date accepted: 16 February 2007


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