SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Deploying an approach to chain analysis concerned with regional differentiation and backshoring, this article investigates the regional complexities of the garment commodity chain in India and its multiple local sweatshop regimes to illustrate the limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) norms. First, the article shows that India's distinctively regional organization of production and product specialization, arising from different local historical legacies of production, reproduces labour outcomes that prevent the effectiveness of CSR. Second, it shows that the backshoring practices used by a powerful group of Pan-Indian buyer-exporters, who increasingly behave like global buyers, further reproduce the logic of the local sweatshop, hence reinforcing the limitations of corporate approaches to labour standards.