Alessandro Guasti & Ishrat Gadhok

  Wednesday, 26th April 2023

  14:15 - 15:15

   Butler Room - Nuffield College

   Supply Chain Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as Strategic Human Capital Management? A Field Experiment to Improve the Health and Work Outcomes of Women in Indian Apparel Sector Factories

ABSTRACT

Research in organizational behaviour and strategic human capital management has argued that CSR can be a powerful tool to influence workers’ behaviours in the workplace. However, extant literature remains limited to white collar work in developed country settings and offers limited insights into how features of program design affect worker outcomes. In partnership with a multinational company from the clothing sector and an Indian NGO, we are designing a field experiment to examine if CSR is able to improve social and economic outcomes for women workers in global supply chains. Our experiment will involve over 3000 workers in 75 different garment factories. Our cluster randomized control trial will consist of a control group (25) and two treatment arms. In the first treatment arm, we examine the impact CSR efforts targeting female workers individually, through training, while the second treatment arm, we’ll explore the impact of organizational-level CSR that trains managers and creates a committee to deal with workers concerns. Our aim is to understand how these different forms of CSR impact worker retention and job satisfaction.