Coupling and Coupling Compromises in Supplier Factories' Responses to Worker Activism

Activist pressure has prompted many companies to adopt formal corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies, but can ongoing activist pressure influence whether companies effectively implement these policies? Drawing on and extending the private politics and (de)coupling literatures, we theorize that ongoing activism in the institutional environment can prompt tighter coupling of companies’ CSR policies and practices, but can also lead companies to engage in “coupling compromises”—coupling practices more tightly with policies in the domain contested by activists, but loosening such coupling in other CSR domains. We test our theory by investigating how global supply chain factories that have adopted CSR policies on working conditions respond to local episodes of worker activism. Analyzing 3,495 audits of 2,352 factories in 114 Chinese cities, we find that worker activism contesting wages-and-benefits issues pushes factories to couple their wages-and-benefits practices more tightly with their policies, but they concurrently loosen the coupling of policy and practice in occupational health and safety. Such coupling compromises are not, however, observed in the area of labor exploitation. Both observed effects are stronger in factories with organizational structures that foreground the salience of wages-and-benefits issues and mitigate the net cost of changing organizational practices.