Empires of fashion: regulatory fictions of accountability and labour control

Purpose

This article investigates the persistence of slavery-like labour control in global supply chains (GSCs) despite proliferating frameworks of corporate accountability, human rights and ethical governance. It argues that the persistence of labour exploitation is not an institutional failure, but a structural feature of global capitalism sustained through despotic forms of power.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Bangladesh garment industry (BGI), the study combines grounded empirical analysis with the theorisation of despotism to reveal how slavery-like labour control is reproduced at the point of production.

Findings

The analysis identifies four interrelated modalities – market, political, cultural and managerial despotism – that together maintain coercive labour regimes. Market despotism reflects the disciplining force of global buyers' demands for speed and cost compression; political despotism emerges through a shadow state that fuses industrial and political power; cultural despotism normalises gendered subordination and managerial despotism enforces these logics through bodily, spatial and temporal control. These interlocking forms expose the limits of modern slavery disclosure regimes, which function as regulatory fictions that perform accountability while concealing violence deployed against marginalised workers.

Originality/value

The article reconceptualises despotism as a systemic configuration of power that links global capital to local governance, advancing critical accounting scholarship by demonstrating that eradicating modern slavery from the GSCs is not a reporting anomaly, but an accounting problem embedded in the organisation of production itself.