Mastanocracy: the legitimization of criminal governance and violence in Bangladesh’s garment industry

The operation of criminal governance within formal-legal industrial contexts connected to global supply chains remains insufficiently theorized in management and organization studies (MOS). How such governance legitimizes violence against marginalized workers both within and beyond organizational boundaries also remains critically underexplored. By analyzing the paradoxical normalization of criminality and violence within Bangladesh’s garment industry, this study exposes the systemic embeddedness of mastans, politically connected criminals, within export-oriented industrial governance. We conceptualize this entanglement as mastanocracy, a hybrid political formation of violent criminal governance that operates legitimately at the nexus of corruption, democratic erosion, elite power and social polarization, advancing the neoliberal economic and political agendas of dominant actors. This research extends MOS by broadening the boundary conditions under which criminal governance is legitimized in a formal-legal industrial environment in the Global South. It also advances the discourse on violence in contemporary organizations by revealing the broader cultural, social and political dynamics that normalize violence within and beyond organizational boundaries, compelling millions of marginalized workers to live and work under regimes of criminal governance.