Global Markets, Corporate Assurances, and the Legitimacy of State Intervention: Perceptions of Distant Labor and Environmental Problems

Abstract

Collective perceptions of harm and impropriety channel the evolution of capitalism, as shown by research on the moral boundaries of markets. But how are boundaries perceived when harms are distant and observers face competing claims from advocacy organizations and corporations? These conditions are particularly salient in global supply chains, where private voluntary initiatives have been formed to address labor exploitation and environmental degradation. We argue that state intervention is now on the rise and that popular judgments about state intervention carry new insights for the sociology of markets, morality, policy, and globalization. Analyzing data from a conjoint survey experiment, we find that distant labor and environmental problems (e.g., forced labor, natural resource depletion) provoke varied levels of interest in state intervention as well as different justifications for state intervention. We also find an asymmetry of influence by strategic actors: transnational advocacy frames shape judgments to some degree, but they fall flat or backfire among conservatives. Corporate promises of reform reduce the perceived importance of state intervention—across political-ideological divides and regardless of credibility. Moving beyond stylized pro-/anti-trade attitudes, these findings reveal implicit logics of a contested moral field and the legitimacy of state intervention at a formative moment.

Foreign corporate accountability: The contested institutionalization of mandatory due diligence in France and Germany

“…This has important consequences for the analysis of global supply chain regulations, since it implies that the emergence of new policy discourses, which attribute companies responsibility for the negative impacts caused by their subsidiaries or suppliers, may actually alter perceptions of citizens and policymakers of how the problems associated with global supply chains should be handled. Indeed, recent survey research shows that citizens who mistrust the effectiveness of private voluntary measures show a higher level of support for stringent supply chain regulations (Amengual & Bartley, 2022). From a discourse analytical perspective, we can argue that policy preferences are shaped by the policy frames and arguments used by the actors during the drafting process.…”

The disparate economic outcomes of stigma: Evidence from the arms industry

“…(Fern & Perlstein, 2003), while an example of the latter was "the organizers of the summer's Glasgow Commonwealth Games have been Patterson (2014), where fights were often labeled as "lawless". Claims of harm and harm-doing are similarly prevalent across the literature (see Amengual & Bartley, 2022;Helms & Patterson, 2014;Schrempf-Stirling, Palazzo, & Phillips, 2016).…”

Honor among Crooks: The Role of Trust in Obfuscated Disreputable Exchange

“…Schilke and Rossman (2018) demonstrate that obfuscation reduces the moral indignation of third parties to political bribery, commercial bribery, and baby-selling, but obfuscation remains more distasteful to audiences than avoiding these transactions altogether. Amengual and Bartley (2022) show that subjects are less likely to demand government regulation in response to corporate malfeasance if the misdeeds were perpetrated by a subcontractor (i.e., brokerage obfuscation). These experimental studies regard third-person understandings; that is, the experimental studies tell participants a story about other people engaging in a certain transaction and ask their opinion about this transaction, but they do not put the participants in the position of choosing how to behave in a possible transaction themselves.…”

“…The economic sociology of obfuscation has produced insights into actors’ sensemaking (Hoang 2018; Mears 2020) and audiences’ moral judgments (Amengual and Bartley 2022; Guo and Xu 2022), but it has yet to delve deeper into the conceptually distinct issue of actors’ decisions of whether or not to engage in obfuscation in the first place. This involves a moral consideration: “Will I be ashamed to engage in an obfuscated disreputable exchange?” It also raises a pragmatic question: “Will I actually receive the goods or services I sought?” For instance, a man might seek sex by acting the part of a sugar daddy and accept the milder shame this implies than being a john, but he might worry the sugar baby could fail to reciprocate his expenditures with sex.…”