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Corporate requirements for modern slavery-type risks in global supply chains, have gained increased attention in recent years. Limited research however has sought to address the context-relevant implications of the contractual mechanisms used to distribute and 'enforce' such requirements. In particular, the socio-economic and cultural factors that underpin and facilitate modern slavery and how these inform supplier and worker choices, have not been addressed by prior SCM scholarship. Ensuring suppliers meet modern slavery requirements, in ways that create legitimate change in the sub-tier environment, remains a complex problem that remains unresolved. For modern slavery type exploitation, the suppliers most at risk of violation exist in the sub-tiers, and in operating environments culturally removed from western-headquartered ideologies. We interviewed 36 executive level Purchasing Directors, from medium to large size firms with headquarters in Australia, the US and Finland. We employed agency and construal level theories to frame our analysis. Overall, several themes emerged regarding the limitations of the principal-agent relationship to address modern slavery risks at a supply chain scale, that reflect significant social, hypothetical and spatial psychological distance between principals, and agents. Importantly, our research drew out a range of significant themes surrounding the conflicts purchasing executives face when attempting to align western policy with complex global operating conditions, and the actual workers they seek to support. Our study sheds light on the challenges of agency theory and highlights the complexity of operationalizing modern slavery type requirements in global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operations and supply chain management scholars have recently focused on humanitarian disaster response activities. However, much of that research has dealt with disaster preparedness, decision-making, and logistics aspects of response efforts. So far, practices related to interorganizational interaction have received limited attention. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework of interaction-related humanitarian operations practices through a grounded theory building study conducted in the context of a major U.S. disaster, Hurricane Sandy. Our investigation identifies several novel practices that have not seen much research focus previously. Our findings advance humanitarian operations research and theory, as well as provide practical takeaways for organizations operating in disaster contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite major, politically successful global campaigns against human trafficking (or forced labor, as the practice is generally labeled in Europe) and despite its links to business and to global supply chains, its treatment in academic business disciplines, including management, business ethics (BE), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and supply chain management (SCM), has been limited. Our central aim in this paper is to address that lacuna, and in doing so to advance a claim that human trafficking-forced labor and ways to counter it should be considered more than the topic is now by business and academia. To that end, we explore the challenges to deeper engagement with the subject by managers and academics. We present an ethnography based on the experience of two of the authors, who have interacted with academics, activists, managers, victims, and perpetrators in relation to human trafficking in various settings, including working with a major technology company to research online sex trafficking. We suggest that managers, activists, and academics who respect the others' roles do better if they inhabit those roles to some degree, with all three groups open to morally-based rules, opportunities for profit, and the search to understand perspectives beyond one's own. We discuss examples that underscore the potential breakthrough nature of taking on another's role, and the need for better understanding of how to evaluate coalitional and role-switching behavior in the morally charged context of human trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]