“Diffusion of Irresponsible Workplace Practices in Supply Chains: The Case of Chinese Manufacturing Firms”
by Frank Wiengarten
ESADE Barcelona
https://zoom.us/j/3370698252?pwd=OWRmQ1hNNWhRWng2QnhsTENzK1hGUT09&omn=93057501126
Meeting ID: 337 069 8252
Abstract:
Firms rarely aim to harm their workers, yet safety may be compromised when safety investments are perceived to conflict with financial and operational efficiency, especially in institutional environments where sanctions are weak or absent. We investigate conditions under which unsafe workplaces diffuse from Chinese manufacturing buyers to their national supply bases. Unsafe workplaces, or the lack of occupational safety is a critical issue in China, as highlighted by persistently high worker accident rates surpassing those in the United States and the European Union.
Utilizing secondary data from multiple databases, this study analyzes data from 2007 to 2020 of 282 Chinese manufacturing firms with 58 accidents and their national supply base with 13,256 suppliers. The results indicate that workplace accidents at buyers are associated with a temporary yet significant increase in the workplace casualty rate among their national supply bases. On average, worker casualty rates in the supply base increased by 542 percent in the same year and the following year after the buyer experienced an accident. This effect is more pronounced when buyers have substantial government shareholding, exhibit strong operational performance, and when the buyer’s supply base had a low accident rate prior to the buyer’s accident. We did not find a significant moderating effect of media coverage of the buyer’s accident on this diffusion effect. The study offers important insights into how cost-driven compromises in safety can spread within supply chains in weak regulatory environments, and highlights policy and managerial levers to mitigate such likely unintended yet harmful outcomes.
Bio:
Frank Wiengarten is a full Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management in the Operations, Innovation & Data Science department at ESADE in Barcelona, Spain. He has been with ESADE for the past 14 years and currently serves as the Vice-Dean of Research at ESADE.
Frank has extensively published his work in top international peer-reviewed journals such as Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, and the Journal of Production and Operations Management.Besides his academic career he has worked for various well-known consultancy and logistic firms such as Price Waterhouse Coopers, the Boston Consulting Group and the DB Schenker Group.
Frank Wiengarten’s current research explores the complexity of global operations and supply chains and its implications on sustainability and efficiency performance outcomes. He is also part of a multicountry research group exploring various sustainable supply chain and related operational performance issues. Frank has extensive experiences in executive teaching in open custom programs. He has been teaching executives in companies such as BMW, BCG, Bunge, Knorr, Volkswagen, Siemens, UPS, Nestle, Intel, Huawai etc.
