Organizational aspirations and violations of a social standard's minimum requirements in the emerging economies' clothing industry

Building on the literature of aspiration-driven behavior, which suggests that performance relative to aspirations (i.e., attainment discrepancy) influences performance corrections, we investigate adaptations of emerging economy supplier social standard compliance attributed to attainment discrepancy between their social performance and organizational aspirations. For this purpose, we rely on social audit reports of the Business Social Compliance Initiative focusing on 66 suppliers from Bangladesh, China, India and Turkey in the clothing industry, which have completed at least four full audits between 2003 and 2012. Our findings demonstrate that social performance below the aspiration level leads emerging market suppliers to improve social standard compliance whereas social performance above the aspiration level guides emerging economy suppliers to deteriorate social standard compliance. These results suggest that emerging market suppliers are unlikely to live up to a social standard's minimum requirements on a continuous basis. We conducted a further analysis to explore how changes in individual social issues shape adaptations of emerging market supplier social standard compliance for positive and negative attainment discrepancies finding that some social issues are more critical than others.