Prof. Andreas Bieler and I have been awarded a grant of £275k by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a project on ‘Globalisation, national transformation and workers’ rights: an analysis of Chinese labour within the global economy’ (RES-062-23-2777; full project proposal). The project starts to run from 1 October 2011. On this blog, I will regularly provide a discussion of empirical findings related to this project.

Monday 18 March 2013

To be, or not to be


This is not only a classic question from Hamlet; the audit inspectors of the Institute of Contemporary Observation (ICO) often face this dilemma when they make their factory visits. At the beginning I was sceptical about these audits, which I assumed were ‘performances’ by the brand-name companies that ordered them. However after I had a talk with the leading inspector of the ICO in January 2013, I realised that there existed some real human struggles under all the paperwork involved in brand-name companies’ audit reports.