Dr Johanne Grosvold is an Associate Professor of Corporate Governance & CSR at the University of Bath School of Management. Her research sits at the intersection of corporate governance, business and human rights. She is the Deputy Director for the Centre for Business Organizations and Society (CBOS) at the University of Bath, the largest and oldest research centre in the School of Management. Until April of this year, she was the President of the International Association of Business and Society (IABS) and she is an Associate Editor at the journal Business & Society and servers on the Editorial Board of Corporate Governance: An international review. Her research has been published in Academy of Management Learning and Education, Corporate Governance; An international review, Business & Society, International Journal of Operation and Production Management and Journal of Supply Chain Management and Accounting Forum.
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Corporate boards of directors are increasingly asked to be accountable for corporate responses to the pervasive problem of modern slavery in their supply chains. Recent national efforts to address modern slavery have centered on passing legislation, rooted in experimentalist governance theory, that is designed to voluntarily compel corporations to exceed compliance, and cascade responsible supply-chain practices upstream. Investing in efforts to identify and eradicate modern slavery is however both expensive and comes with no guarantees of success or return on investment. Such efforts are therefore at odds with agency-theory and the board's fiduciary duty, which is to ensure the long-term financial interests of shareholders. This theoretical tension between agency theory and the experimentalist governance is the basis for our theoretical development. We develop a conceptual argument that seeks to explain why modern slavery will never be successfully addressed as long as these tensions exist, and instead we offer a theoretical extension that redirects the theoretical debate on modern slavery towards a means of reconciling tensions.