Evaluating Social Transparency in Global Apparel Supply Chains

The apparel industry has fallen under publicized scrutiny in recent years for not ensuring safe and healthy conditions for its workers. With consumers becoming more aware of these issues and creating public pressure on the industry, many companies are increasingly trying to institute transparency within their supply chains in order to rectify these problems. At the same time, transparency itself is not clearly defined in the realm of supply chain responsibility, which makes the process of quantifying transparency within companies rather difficult. The main goal of this project is to establish a framework and methodology that can be used to define and quantify social transparency across different companies with the apparel industry as a case study. We are developing these methods by understanding how different but equally important factors - business, technology, and policy-making - can be employed to analyze transparency and ultimately provide suggestions for correcting issues of compromised working conditions in apparel supply chains.