En fallstudie av ett klädföretags sociala ansvarstagande av deras produktion

Sammanfattning: In todays globalized world it is common for companies to outsource their production to less developed countries, mostly in Asia. Due to outsourced production, many social challenges have arisen for companies to deal with, and this question has been widely discussed within the textile industry. Previous research shows that social issues in the supply chain is often about violations against human rights aspects, such as poor working conditions, unsafety and low wages. As an answer to this, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been widely adopted by companies to deal with the social issues within the production. This study aims to examine how a Swedish clothing company constitute itself with social responsibility and how CSR is a tool to manage the social challenges within the production. Therefore, the theoretical framework is based on CSR and two social responsibility models of Iris Marion Young. Since this is a qualitative study, both interviews with key persons of the company and official documents of the company’s website are used as empirical material. The empirical evidence is then analyzed based on the theoretical framework using a thematic analysis approach. The findings show that we can understand their work with CSR from different areas such as stakeholders, legitimacy, ethics, juridical and societal understandings. The company uses CSR as a tool to evaluate their suppliers by gradating them in different levels depending on how good they are with CSR implementations. The company takes a social responsibility which is based on improvement, understanding and collective action together with other companies in the industry. The social responsibility can also be understood by aspects such as accusing and therefore an isolated responsibility. The deficiencies of CSR are identified as a lack of transparency on the part of suppliers. The findings also show a lack of CSR implementation further down the supply chain since that type of suppliers is not evaluated as the clothing factories are.