The development of multistage global supply chains has opened up economic opportunities in many developing countries, lifting millions out of poverty. The distribution of these gains, however, has been highly uneven across the different stages or parts of production processes, as highlighted by Gary Gereffi’s Global Value Chains and Development (2018). It also has been very unequal within the participating countries (e.g., coastal vs. inland) and within the participating communities.

Shareen Hertel’s fascinating new book focuses on the local community level in her analysis of the Alta Gracia Apparel Corporation (building on earlier studies by Adler-Milstein, Kline, and Soule, as well as Landefeld and coauthors). Thanks to a worker-driven and worker-negotiated business model, Alta Gracia markets high-end collegiate apparel to customers in the United States who are willing to pay higher prices for t-shirts, sweatshirts, and the like produced in a “living wage” factory. As a result, Alta Gracia is able to elevate its 200 textile workers from precarious working-class to middle-class socioeconomic status—creating an oasis of triple minimum wage workers’ incomes while, however, having little impact on the larger community in the eponymous city of 84,000 with its high unemployment, rampant crime, and often failing public services.

Along with economic opportunities, the globalization of supply chains has shifted air pollution, water pollution, injuries from poor workplace safety, and other environmental, economic, and social externalities of economic activities to countries that generally impose fewer legal and regulatory constraints on industrial activities. In addition, many of these countries only weakly enforce whatever protections they de jure offer their workers and communities.

Some argue that offering fewer constraints on exploitation and harm to local communities is—for better or worse—part of the “comparative advantage” of many developing countries today. Indeed, developing countries’ concern about a loss of economic opportunities is one reason why addressing these externalities through international agreements has proven very challenging and largely ineffective, especially when the local links in the supply chains are legally independent, domestically owned firms, rather than subsidiaries of multinationals from the OECD countries, where most of the ultimate customers reside.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the plethora of related transnational standards, certifications, and labels have been a (still imperfect but often promising) tool to address such externalities. As highlighted in David Vogel’s Market for Virtue (2005), Jessica Green’s Rethinking Private Authority (2014), Tim Bartley’s Rules without Rights (2018), and Stefan Renckens’s Private Governance and Public Authority (2020), such private governance assures consumers that production has been environmentally sustainable, “fair” to labor, free from forced or child labor, and so on, throughout the supply chain. In doing so, it allows Northern activists and consumers to put pressure on the lead firms to minimize harms, thereby creating commercial incentives for the firms to work toward improvements for workers and communities even at the early stages of their supply chains.

Chapters 4 and 5 of Tethered Fates contrast and compare in depth the operation of two CSR models: (1) the more conventional “business and human rights” (BHR) CSR model, in which external actors, possibly consumers, make rights-based claims on companies, whose management then, at its own discretion, takes actions and makes commitments for “responsible” behavior and (2) the “worker-driven social responsibility” (WSR), which is (to a greater extent) based on worker and community participation “forging binding standards and mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing corporate responsibility from the bottom up” (p. 2). Hertel’s book provides rich insights into these two approaches through an in-depth, partly ethnographic comparison of the operation and broader consequences of the conventional BHR-CSR model in a Hanes textile factory in the Dominican city of Bonao and the WSR model in the Alta Gracia textile factory in the nearby, highly comparable Dominican city of Villa Altagracia.

This book is a timely addition to the literature on the promise and limitation of CSR and the private governance of transnational production. Much CSR research has focused on firms in extractive industries, for which immobile assets and few viable alternative locations make relocating production or “sourcing” difficult. More recently, research on the successes and pitfalls of private governance in agriculture, such as Shana Starobin’s work on Mexican honey production and Thomas Dietz and Janina Grabs’s work on Central American coffee production, has enriched this literature by examining economic sectors where production itself is immobile for the owners, but the number of alternative producers is very large. Research on private governance of “light manufacturing”—industries characterized by intense competition and mobile assets—has been still comparatively rare, notwithstanding the important work by Richard Locke and Tim Bartley. And as Hertel’s analysis of 15 years of original data from the Business and Human Rights Resource Center shows, claims to participatory governance, traditionally concentrated in extractive/high-fixed-assets industries, are increasingly found in light industries too.

The book’s most important contribution may be its indictment of both rights-based and participatory models of governance of global markets and supply chains, at least in contexts where such governance is mostly transnational and private. Public institutions for making rights-based claims too often fail to provide avenues for addressing community grievances (or negative externalities in general) because of insufficient institutional capacity and/or predatory behavior in societies characterized by extreme inequality, clientelism, and corruption.

The book’s examination of these topics is based, above all, on a combination of participant observation and semistructured ethnographic interviews with members of the two local communities, about which Hertel shares a wealth of methodological insights (pp. 56–59). This allows Hertel to provide fascinating, empirically rich accounts of individual everyday socioeconomic challenges in light of the local incarnation of economic globalization and perceptions of community needs, as well as knowledge of, interest in, experiences with, and assessments of stakeholder dialogues between the local community and the companies that tie them to global value chains.

Those accounts show that the BHR-CSR model appears to lead, above all, to “corporate philanthropy,” optimized for marketing vis-a-vis Northern retailers and consumers. Local knowledge of Hanes’s domestic activities is shockingly low. Although the company features such philanthropy prominently in its annual report, it appears to have made few attempts to make its programs known locally, not even among the actual beneficiaries of, for instance, truly generous, company-paid “free” medical services. Nor is there any corporate engagement with the community, whose priority needs the company appears to have mostly gotten wrong for years.

As Hertel notes (7, 15ff, 150f, passim), the rights-based approach can also be used to assert for the local communities a “right to participate in the design and implementation of programs” to ensure that a broader societal benefit is derived from the local productive activities and that negative externalities are averted, or that the local community is compensated in some way. This in fact corresponds to the core logic of the WSR model, resulting in the theoretical expectation of more participatory and stakeholder dialogue-focused elements in the WSR context of Alta Gracia Apparel.

Such stakeholder participation, however, is just not happening in the poor communities Hertel studied. In fact, without a strong, politically mobilized civil society, many members of these local communities appear not even able to imagine such consultative fora for corporate–community engagement as a way to achieve real gains for their community, even when prompted by Hertel. Many people’s daily struggles are too severe; many of them are too cynical after years of experiencing corruption and mismanagement wherever they look. Fostering sustained participatory governance in such contexts will require more than articulating norms or obligations for companies to involve—and engage with—affected local communities. It will require setting up procedures for those communities to voice concerns and grievances, as well as mechanisms for the participation of stakeholders in the choice or design of redress and accountability mechanisms to ensure that such complaints are indeed addressed.