Eco-Friendly and Fair

Fast Fashion and Consumer Behaviour

Mark Heuer, Carolin Becker-Leifhold, Mark Heuer, Carolin Becker-Leifhold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783538201
• eBook ISBN: 9781351058339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Ética empresarial

The make-take-waste paradigm of fast fashion explains much of the producer and consumer behavior patterns towards fast fashion. The evolution from a two-season fashion calendar to fast fashion, characterized by rapid product cycles from retailers and impulse buying by consumers, presents new challenges to the environment, workplace and labour practices.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of new insights into consumer behaviour mechanisms in order to shift practices toward sustainable fashion and to minimize the negative impacts of fast fashion on the environment and society. Concepts and techniques are presented that could overcome the formidable economic drivers of fast fashion and lead toward a future of sustainable fashion.

While the need for change in the fashion industry post-Rana Plaza could not be more obvious, alternative and more sustainable consumption models have been under-investigated. The paucity of such research extends to highly consumptive consumer behaviours regarding fast fashion (i.e. impulse buying and throwaways) and the related impediments these behaviours pose for sustainable fashion.

Written by leading researchers in the field of sustainable fashion and supported by the Textile Institute, this book evaluates fashion trends, what factors have led to new trends and how the factors supporting fast fashion differ from those of the past. It explores the economic drivers of fast fashion and what social, environmental and political factors should be maintained, and business approaches adopted, in order for fast fashion to be a sustainable model. In particular, it provides consumer behaviour concepts that can be utilized at the retail level to support sustainable fashion.

Part I
The fast fashion phenomena and its consequences from a sustainability point of view

1
Rana Plaza as a threat to the fast fashion model?

An analysis of institutional responses to the disaster in Germany

Nora Lohmeyer and Elke Schüßler

1. The Rana Plaza factory collapse

On 24 April 2013, a nine-story garment factory in Sabhar, a city in the northwest of Dhaka, collapsed. More than 1,100 workers died and more than 2,400 were injured. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building is one of the deadliest accidents in the history of the global garment industry, but sadly only one in a series of factory accidents in Bangladesh, Pakistan and other garment-producing countries.

The reasons for such accidents are manifold. Since the 1970s, when big retailers shifted most of their sourcing to Asia to realize rock-bottom prices through economies of scale and wage arbitrage, the garment industry has been subject to immense price competition. Together with a history of complicated customs and trade laws (Rivoli, 2005), this price competition has led to an ever-increasing complexity of global production networks (GPN).

These factors have been aggravated by the rise of the “fast fashion” business model. Defined by the objective of getting fashionable, low-cost clothing into stores “within the shortest time possible” (Bruce & Daly, 2006, p. 330; Cachon & Swinney, 2011), fast fashion – in addition to pressure on prices – intensifies time pressure and demands for high flexibility. These strains are passed on from lead firms to suppliers. Often understood as a “consumer-driven-approach” (Bhardwaj & Fairhurst, 2010; Barnes & Lea-Greenwood, 2006), fast fashion plays an important role in shaping the conditions for suppliers and their workers in the so-called Global South today. Empirical research shows that the characteristics of the fast fashion segment “create additional constraints on supplier firms and workers and circumscribe social upgrading prospects” (Plank, Rossi, & Staritz, 2012, p. 15). Taplin (2014) directly holds fast fashion consumption responsible for disasters like Rana Plaza.

Despite long-standing efforts to integrate consumers more meaningfully into industrial relations research (Heery, 1993; Frenkel, Korczynski, Shire, & Tam, 1999), the consumer is still often ignored as an industrial relations actor (Kessler & Bach, 2011, p. 81). This is surprising given that consumer-driven social movements can play an important role in pressurizing lead firms towards more ethical behaviour (Bansal & Roth, 2000; Reinecke & Donaghey, 2015). Donaghey and colleagues (2014, p. 230) “argue for the need to focus on the consumer who, despite being a postproduction actor outside of the employment contract, has become an important driver of private labor governance.” Global supply chains in the garment industry are buyer-driven (Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, 2005), and it has been argued that initiatives for change should focus less on the supplier and more on the buyer side (Anner, Bair, & Blais, 2013), that is on the interface at the point of consumption where reputational damage is a strong concern. Against the background of the decreasing role of union membership and density in many countries, and the inability of states to regulate working standards, consumer campaigns might be an effective means to drive a stronger regulation of global supply chains (O’Rourke, 2011).

While consumer-driven initiatives have contributed to the formation of the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (Reinecke & Donaghey, 2015), for example, it is surprising to see few institutional initiatives that target consumer behaviour as an outcome, for instance through greater transparency about production conditions and the detrimental effects of fast fashion consumption. Even though consumers should not be made responsible for labor standards violations, consumers can be an important driver of social change, either through anti-consumption or through forging new forms of consumption (Hartl, Hofmann, & Kirchler, 2016). To date, however, the most significant responses to the Rana Plaza disaster were initiatives targeting a change in production conditions, such as building and fire safety standards, and not a change in consumer behaviour and the fast fashion business model.

In this chapter, in order to shed light on the emergence of the aforementioned imbalance, we will outline the main institutional responses to the Rana Plaza disaster from the perspective of Germany, a core importer of ready-made garments from Bangladesh. We will examine the focus of these initiatives, that is whether they focus on changing the behaviour of producers or consumers, as well as the actors and politics behind them. Thus, we go beyond the distinction between production- and consumption-based mobilization strategies (Donaghey, Reinecke, Niforou, & Lawson, 2014; Reinecke & Donaghey, 2015, 2016) towards distinguishing whether labor governance approaches in global garment supply chains are production- or consumption-oriented. Whereas the former pays attention to the actor constellations pushing for change in labor standards governance (e.g. labor actors vs. consumers and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs), we are looking at whether governance initiatives aim at changes in the production or the consumption side of the supply chain, that is whether they are geared towards changing working conditions at supplier factories or challenging the fast fashion model and the related consumer behaviour. With regard to the latter, lead firms play a somewhat intermediary role, because they can either be targeted by initiatives in their role as buyers and coordinators of GPN (i.e. as involved in the production side, e.g. by providing suppliers with a list of acceptable chemical inputs into production processes), or as powerful market actors with the capacity to influence consumption practices (e.g. through their business models).

2. Rana Plaza as a focusing event

The field-changing dynamic of so-called focusing events, such as environmental disasters, terrorist attacks or industrial catastrophes, has often been highlighted (Birkland, 1997, 2004; Albright, 2011). A focusing event is commonly defined as

an event that is sudden, relatively rare, can be reasonably defined as harmful or revealing the possibility of potentially greater future harms, inflicts harms or suggests potential harms that are or could be concentrated on a definable geographic area or community of interest, and that is known to policy makers and the public virtually simultaneously.

(Birkland, 1997, p. 22)

Focusing events – due to these characteristics – can promote certain policy agendas and potentially lead to institutional change.

Focusing events allow for change to occur, as they might lead to the convergence of already existing “streams” of problems, policies and politics (Kingdon, 1995). That is, due to a specific event, certain problems become salient and accepted by policy makers, might be matched with policy ideas and gain political momentum. For change to happen, all three streams – problems, solutions/policies and politics – need to be combined, a task that requires so-called policy entrepreneurs (Mucciaroni, 1992, pp. 460–461) such as governmental bodies, NGOs, unions, associations and other actors or coalitions of these actors (Albright, 2011). However, the outcome of this policy process might vary, depending on different representations of the three streams (Farley et al., 2007). Without doubt, the Rana Plaza disaster can be interpreted as a focusing event, and our aim in this chapter is to look more closely at the nature of the German policy outcomes that have ensued from it so far.

3. Methods

Our analysis is based on a series of 25 expert interviews with representatives from business associations, policy makers, unions, NGOs, investors and consultants conducted between 2013 and 2017. The interviews are combined with insights gained from our ongoing research of the garment industry in Germany and other countries (www.garmentgov.de), which includes attendance at several industry events.

Based on our research, we have identified five main policy responses to the Rana Plaza disaster in Germany: the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (Textile Partnership), the Garment Industries Transparency Initiative (GITI), efforts to develop an employment injury protection scheme (EIPS) for Bangladeshi garment workers, initiatives focusing on sustainable public procurement, and the online platform http://textilklarheit.de.

We classify these initiatives as either production- or consumption-oriented (see Table 1.1) based on where they seek to effect changes.

Table 1.1 Definitions of core concepts

Production-oriented	Consumption-oriented
Initiatives that aim to effect changes in supplier practices either directly, e.g. through local capacity building or funds for improvement, e.g. fire and building safety, or indirectly, by making lead firms more accountable for supplier practices (e.g. sustainable reporting initiatives).	Initiatives that aim to effect changes in the behaviour of end consumers and public buyers, e.g. through information about the detrimental effects of fast fashion or public procurement policies, as well as initiatives that aim to change organizational buyers' business models towards more sustainable consumption practices.

Using the focusing events framework, we analyze the problem (how is the problem defined?), policy (which policy templates are used?) and political (which actors are involved?) streams related to these initiatives, and therewith explain why Rana Plaza has led to substantial institutional changes with regards to the production side, but has failed to address equally important issues such as consumption behaviour and the logic of fast fashion.

4. Findings

In Germany, as in many industrialized countries, Rana Plaza has opened a “policy window” (Birkland, 2004, p. 181) and led to a variety of initiatives. Guided by the focusing event framework, we provide an overview about the initiatives that followed from Rana Plaza. Hereby, we show that the initiatives mainly focus on the production and not on the consumption side. Table 1.2 summarizes our findings, which we will outline in more detail below.

One of the most notable initiatives is the German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles. The goal of the Textile Partnership is to improve the social, environmental and economic conditions along global garment supply chains (Textile Partnership, 2017; for a detailed discussion, see Jastram & Schneider, 2015). This partnership was initiated by the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in October 2014 and – as a multi-stakeholder-initiative – now comprises a variety of actors from garment retailers, government, standard-setting organizations, NGOs and unions. Following already existing standards, the members jointly developed an action plan, committing themselves to improve social and environmental conditions, such as wages or the use of hazardous chemicals, at their supplier sites. Consumer behaviour or the member firm’s business models are not addressed by this initiative, even though the Textile Partnership consistently emphasizes the focus on the whole supply chain, “from raw material production to disposal” (BMZ, 2016, p. 10), thereby (potentially) addressing consumers. Moreover, one of the stated means towards sustainable supply chains is “transparent communication, which allows consumers to easily identify sustainable textiles” (Textile Partnership, 2015, p. 5; 2017, p. 2). However, no explicit measures to address the consumer or the fast fashion model more generally have been taken by this initiative so far.

Table 1.2 Analysis of the German responses to Rana Plaza

Initiative	Problem stream – problem definition	Policy stream – existing templates	Political stream – involved actors
Textile Partnership	Production-oriented (buyers and suppliers)	Existing standards and existing firm-level initiatives	BMZ and lead firms experienced in multi-stakehol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributing authors
• Preface – introduction from the editors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I The fast fashion phenomena and its consequences from a sustainability point of view
• PART II Fast fashion and the consumer
• PART III Alternative models for a sustainable fashion consumption
• PART IV Supply chain insights
• Conclusion from the editors
• Index