ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a contextual understanding of retailers' corporate responsibility, with a focus on the value chain. It also introduces a historical review of important stages in the process of acknowledging corporate responsibility, which provides a historical context to current actions. It focuses on the empirical analysis which lies on communicated corporate responsibility initiatives by the garment retailers and where in the value chain these initiatives take place. The essence of corporate responsibility is to create shared value for the corporation and its stakeholders. The chapter is concerned with present conditions for corporate responsibility in the garment industry from a retailer perspective and future expectations of sustainable value chain development. Since the early 1990s, Swedish garment retailers have come under increasing critical scrutiny by non-governmental organisations, and have been exposed to negative media because of poor working conditions and negative environmental impacts in the complex supply chains.
