Managing Global Production Networks: Towards Social Responsibility via Inter-organizational Reliability?

Abstract

Taking a whole network perspective, we theorize on whether and how global production networks can enhance their social responsibility by managing the inter-organizational relations that constitute such networks in a more reliable way. Combining insights from the literature on network governance and the management of inter-firm networks, we develop a practice-based perspective on how inter-organizational reliability, understood as the recurrent and effective collaboration of organizations in a network to ensure outcome quality, process stability and work safety, can be extended to issues of social responsibility in the area of labour standards. Our core argument is that creating and nourishing relations between lead firms and suppliers enhances not only inter-organizational reliability but can contribute to a higher degree of social responsibility in global production networks. For network management, i.e. selection, evaluation, allocation and regulation, this means paying more attention to where managing for reliability and responsibility in networks converges in practice. The task at hand for research is to improve our understanding of exactly how and under what conditions inter-organizational reliability contributes to network responsibility.