SSMART Workshop 1

The Political Economy of Ethical Supply Chains

6 - 10 April 2010

The aim of this workshop is to help improve participants capacity to carry out high-quality political economic research in the service of an important topic of interest to scholars, government and corporate policy-makers, and NGOs.

The workshop will run over a five day period. The mornings will be devoted to discussion of readings assigned by Hiscox and Levi. The afternoons will involve constructive critiques of proposed student research. There will also be a symposium composed of individuals who have done research in this area; the participants will be drawn from the NGO, corporate, and government sectors.

At the completion of this workshop the capacity of the students to undertake this kind of research and their motivation for doing so should be vastly improved.

This workshop would be suit students or early career researchers in political science, economics, sociology, law, and policy.

There are no pre-requisites for this workshop.

Read the syllabus for SSMART Workshop 1

Presenters

Michael Hiscox: Hiscox's research focuses on international trade, foreign investment, immigration, development, and private sector standards for ethical and environmentally responsible practices. He has written a number of articles for leading scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review, International Organization, and the Journal of Economic History. He is also the author of two books. The first book, International Trade and Political Conflict, was published by Princeton University Press in 2002 and won the William H. Riker Prize for the best book in political economy that year. His second book, High Stakes: The Political Economy of U.S, Trade Sanctions, 1950-2000, will be published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press.

His recent papers have addressed the measurement of barriers to international trade, attitudes toward trade and immigration among voters, connections between globalization and democratization, and questions concerning labor and environmental standards and the ethical labeling of traded products. Current projects include field experiments testing the impact of ethical certification and labeling programs in developing countries and consumer demand for ethically labeled products.

Margaret Levi: Former President of the American Political Science Association (2004-5), Levi is Director of the University of Washington's CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and Director, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, the co-general editor of the Trust series for Russell Sage Foundation Press, and the general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science.

Levi is the author of three solely authored books, including Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (1997) and Of Rule and Revenue (1988); and the joint author of Analytic Narratives (1998); Cooperation Without Trust? (2005); and Democracy at Risk (2005). She is the co-editor of five additional books. Her current research focuses on: 1) the conditions under which people come to believe governments and organizations are legitimate representatives of their interest and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law; and 2) how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. She also continues to write on issues concerning the analytic narrative approach to the study of complex historical and comparative processes. Concurrently, she is working on a range of issues having to do with labor unions and with global justice campaigns.