Consumers as regulators of global value chains’ conduct? A consumer-inclusive framework of change

Lilac Nachum (), Stephan Manning () and Sankar Sen ()
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Lilac Nachum: Leeds University Business School
Stephan Manning: University of Sussex Business School
Sankar Sen: City University New York

Journal of International Business Policy, 2025, vol. 8, issue 2, No 4, 172-193

Abstract: Abstract Inadequate conduct of global value chains (GVCs) has given rise to serious concerns by academics and policymakers but efforts to improve it have made minimal progress, jeopardizing global wealth distribution and accentuating inequality. In the work, we advance a novel analytical framework for addressing this concern, underpinned by the trust of including the consumers as an important constituency that could bring about the desired change. Blending insights of governmentality, social movements, and ethical consumerism theories with those of ethical conduct in GVCs and combining them with lessons of a comparative analysis of ethical conduct in the coffee and fashion GVCs, we develop a framework for change that is driven by consumer agency and their power to ‘regulate’ global brands’ conduct via their consumption behavior. We identify a range of private- and public-sector constituencies that could mobilize the consumers towards this end and explicate the mechanisms to bring about this outcome. This framework supplements the top-down approach proposed by extant research with a bottom-up, grassroots approach. In doing this, it directs the debate regarding GVC conduct to new directions based on a different logic. The framework guides policy intervention by extending the role of governments from that of regulators of global brands to facilitators of consumers’ mobilization and societal change.

Keywords: Ethical conduct; Governance theory; Social movement theories; Global value chains (GVCs); Ethical consumption; Influencers; Government policy; Fashion and coffee industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1057/s42214-025-00211-z

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