Upgrading the global garment industry: internationalization, capabilities and sustainability

The covid-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the interconnected nature of many business activities. The loss of orders from global retailers in developed economies has worsened the living conditions for many garment-industry workers in emerging economies, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam. Many suppliers in these countries have remained locked into relatively low-value, low-margin, low-skilled activities. However, in a relatively little noticed phenomenon, some suppliers have been able to upgrade their capabilities and have internationalized, establishing facilities abroad to strengthen ties to existing buyers. The contributions to this book document this phenomenon, highlighting the factors that promote or hinder higher levels of internationalization, the conditions that influence the development of suppliers’ capabilities, and how some firms achieve higher levels of sustainable production. They do so from various perspectives, including international business, global value chain, strategy, innovation, operations management and sociological perspectives. Together the book’s chapters represent an important contribution to the literature, focusing on important aspects of GVCs using firm-centric analysis that the existing literature tends to downplay. By enabling us to understand those challenges better, those contributions can help to provide ways for suppliers to overcome them. Collectively, therefore, we hope the chapters in this book offer a positive message for suppliers, multinational buyers, and workers within GVCs during a time of unprecedented challenges.