A Review of Private Regulation: Codes and Monitoring in the Apparel Industry

This article reviews the last decade of scholarship on a leading corporate social responsibility initiative: the use of codes of conduct and monitoring in the global garment industry. The review focuses on three debates in the field: the evaluation of code and monitoring effectiveness, the problematic of various relationships in transnational anti‐sweatshop campaigns, and the meaning of private regulation vis‐a‐vis state enforcement. The article concludes that codes and monitoring do not constitute a solution to the sweatshop problem and certainly cannot substitute for state enforcement or worker organizing. If private regulation is to contribute to a solution in a meaningful way, it must move from a model that presumes compliance and, therefore, focuses on ferreting out violators, to one that assumes non‐compliance, and so concentrates on altering the structure of the industry.