ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the politics of corporate responsibility in the context of global production. While most of the corporate social responsibility literature discusses potentials, limits and normative fundaments of business responsibilities, the main interest here is to understand responsibility as a product of social practices. ‘Social responsibility practices’ refer to the set of practices that one would identify as acts of assuming responsibility for social concerns, especially normative statements and programmes of implementation in garment production networks: corporate codes of conduct, reports, joined governance initiatives, monitoring techniques, risk assessments. A recent example in which one can see the strengthening of corporate lead firm agency ‘in the name of responsibility’ is the Accord. The Accord was a political response to the catastrophic Rana Plaza factory building collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, in which 1,135 workers lost their lives due to massive deficits in basic fire and building safety.
