Across global supply chains, buyers enforce labour codes as a primary mechanism for ensuring suppliers’ social compliance with international labour standards and rights for workers in supplier facilities. Yet researchers have long documented empirical evidence of the inconsistent, weak implementation of labour codes. Therefore, the effective use of this social compliance mechanism requires examining what causes supply chain actors to exhibit failures in substantively implementing labour codes, or ‘social compliance decoupling’. We conducted the first systematic review of all available empirical evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, on the implementation of labour codes by actors at different stages of the supply chain, to identify and catalogue the root causes of social compliance decoupling. By integrating our findings, we propose a conceptual framework on ‘social compliance decoupling cascades’ that illustrates the causes of social compliance decoupling by supply chain actors at different stages and explains three pathways through which decoupling by an actor translates into decoupling by one or more adjacent actors (‘rewards–rights trade-off’, ‘compliance capital scarcity’ and ‘code acontextuality’). We recommend opportunities for research and best practice around the recoupling of social compliance through multi-stakeholder collaboration, mutual investment, relational sourcing and expansion of the scope of global supply chain social responsibility to drive effective labour code implementation.

中文翻译：

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全球供应链中的“社会合规脱钩级联”：对劳工法规实施情况的审查

在全球供应链中，买家执行劳工法规作为确保供应商社会遵守国际劳工标准和供应商工厂工人权利的主要机制。然而，研究人员长期以来记录了劳动法执行不一致、薄弱的经验证据。因此，有效利用这种社会责任机制需要审视是什么原因导致供应链参与者在实质性执行劳动法规方面表现出失败，或者说“社会责任脱钩”。我们对供应链不同阶段的参与者执行劳动法规的所有可用的定性和定量经验证据进行了首次系统审查，以识别和分类社会责任脱钩的根本原因。通过整合我们的研究结果，我们提出了一个关于“社会合规脱钩级联”的概念框架，该框架说明了供应链参与者在不同阶段社会合规脱钩的原因，并解释了参与者的脱钩转化为一个或多个相邻供应商的脱钩的三种途径。参与者（“奖励-权利权衡”、“合规资本稀缺”和“代码无语境性”）。我们建议通过多方利益相关者合作、相互投资、关系采购和扩大全球供应链社会责任范围来重新耦合社会合规性的研究和最佳实践，以推动有效的劳动法实施。