Managing Global Guilt and Local Norms Governance in the Sri Lankan Clothing Industry

This dissertation examines how multiple forms of governance shape ethical production in Sri Lankan clothing supply chains. With multi-sited research in Sri Lanka, the United States, and Europe, it foregrounds how mid-level managers, as embodied subjects in clothing supply chains, conceptualize and practice ethical trade as they navigate demands to be globally competitive, comply with global standards, and respect local ethical norms. I found that the Sri Lankan apparel industry's attempts to promote ethical manufacturing have led to mixed and uneven effects, meaning that the results did not straightforwardly confirm the hypothesis in the global value chain literature that private governance and industrial upgrading lead to global competitiveness and enhanced wellbeing. Because a series of mediating factors have shaped how the ethical initiatives played out in Sri Lanka, I argue for a more de-centered theory of governance that is attentive to multiple fields of power and forms of struggle occurring through GPNs. I also argue for a sustained critical engagement with the concept of upgrading and its effects on social and economic worlds.;This project makes three key contributions to broader debates about globalization. First, it draws on feminist methods and critical policy studies to promote a deeper engagement between the commodity chains literatures and relational economic geography. This is important because the global value chain framework is increasingly gaining currency in mainstream development institutions, but there is also growing criticism about the foundational concepts of governance and upgrading in this framework. Second, I focus on the role of management knowledges and practices in processes of upgrading. Managers are situated at the nexus of global-local power relations and yet very little is understood about how ethical concerns are prioritized, adapted, and contested (or not) through everyday management cultures and practices. My third contribution is to challenge conceptualizations of ethical production that are fixed and binary, such as the assumption that there is an easy answer to questions like, "Was this t-shirt ethically made?" Instead, I reframe ethical initiatives as processes that are ongoing, embodied, and shaped by relations of dominance and subordination at multiple scales.