(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Fifteen years ago, a graduate student at MIT named Jonah Peretti asked Nike to personalize a pair of its customizable sneakers with the word “sweatshop.” Nike refused his request, and Peretti became the face of the “name and shame” anti-sweatshop movement that had gathered steam in the 1990s. (Peretti went on to found the website Buzzfeed and to cofound the Huffington Post.) Over the course of that decade, meanwhile, Nike had shifted most of its production to facilities outside the United States. According to a common narrative that emerged during that period, the anti-sweatshop movement was essentially an anti-globalization movement. New research, however, indicates that other factors correlate far more strongly with a company’s likelihood of becoming a social movement target than whether the company has outsourced its manufacturing to non-US factories.
“There’s no doubt that globalization is the backdrop to this movement, but there isn’t a [direct connection] between the loss of unionized jobs in the United States and the anti-sweatshop movement,” says Tim Bartley, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University. Along with Curtis Child, an assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, Bartley conducted quantitative analyses of 151 large US-based firms in the apparel, textile, and footwear industries. Their study covers the years 1993 to 2000, and it draws from information in corporate databases and from data on anti-sweatshop activity published in the trade journals Bobbin and Women’s Wear Daily, among other sources.
The researchers found that company size and corporate image are far more likely to trigger protest activity than a company’s association with non-US factories. The larger a company is, the better known its brand, and the higher its corporate reputation, the more likely it is to become a focus of social movement activity. Such characteristics provide activists with “points of leverage” for their campaigns, the researchers contend. “Naming and shaming depends on companies’ being ‘shamable,’” Bartley explains. “So if a company is not well known, doesn’t have much of a reputation in the business community, and hasn’t promised to make the world a better place, then it doesn’t make for a very good target.”
Egregious behavior alone—such as operating a factory with sweatshop conditions—often isn’t enough to draw pressure from activists. “If they haven’t invested much in their brand or reputation, sometimes the worst companies are ignored,” says Brayden King, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who studies how social activists influence political and organizational change. “The companies that rely on the vitality of their public image are the ones that are most vulnerable to attack.”
So which companies, in particular, are most likely to attract anti-protest activity? According to Bartley and Child, “branded marketers” are far more likely to become targets than other kinds of companies. Branded marketers, which include firms such as Nike and Liz Claiborne, handle only the design and marketing of goods and have little or no manufacturing or retail capacity. The researchers distinguish those companies from others—such as general retailers, specialty retailers, and branded manufacturers—that are part of the apparel supply chain.
Bartley and Child speculate that branded marketers not only have a brand image that catches the attention of protesters, but also have a tendency to treat their suppliers and workers in a certain way. “These companies put so much emphasis on branding and marketing that they were somewhat relentless in squeezing manufacturers and suppliers. There was evidence of abuse—poor treatment of workers, underpayment of wages, dangerous conditions, and so on,” says Bartley. “Those conditions exist throughout the industry, but we suspect that branded marketers were more ruthless than the others.”
Tim Bartley and Curtis Child, “Shaming the Corporation: The Social Production of Targets and the Anti-Sweatshop Movement,” American Sociological Review, 79, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.