Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sustainability Labor Across a Corporate Supply Chain

This doctoral dissertation project examines sustainability initiatives among corporations in the private sector. Sustainability initiatives are common and contextualized by concerns about the environment and resource management. Tradeoffs may arise, however, between environmental and economic considerations, and these tradeoffs can shape the implementation of corporate sustainability initiatives. This project provides an ethnographic study of the workers, including both company employees and independent contractors, who design and implement the initiatives along supply chains. The study explores the extent to which workers’ social relationships, backgrounds, practices, and values contribute to variation in their attempts to make corporate supply chains more transparent and environmentally sustainable. While providing a training opportunity for an early-career scientist, the findings of this project provide feedback to the organizations and individuals who are advancing and monitoring corporate sustainability. In contrast to previous scholarship that examines the governance of corporate sustainability at the level of firms and organizations, this study focuses on the experiences and orientations of individuals who engage with sustainability initiatives at multiple stages along a supply chain. As a multi-sited ethnography, it uses interviews and observations of a sample of individuals and settings to infer the practices and knowledge that constitute sustainability work and the variability that arises from factors such as material conditions and social relationships. The project also elucidates the extent to which value is heterogeneously attributed to the outputs and processes of sustainability labor. The empirical findings of this project contribute to labor geographies, science and technology studies, and scholarship on political ecology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.