The world needs a lot of things. We have to be very
focused on solving problems, and what I was
so struck about being here at Brown is how people were
really talking across disciplines.
So we have a group of people at Watson doing
development, and they're anthropologists, and
economists, and political scientists, sociologists,
but then we are working with people in public health,
who care about human development. What I think is so
great about this place is that there's people who
are very much commited to these problems and are
willing to work across disciplines.
Think of all the mistakes we've made in the Middle East.
Imagine if we could train people who actually
knew the language, knew the history, knew the culture,
and knew something about security or development
or governance, if we could populate the world with
people who have those skills, that would do
the world a great thing.
There are several things that, if I think of what made me
do the kind of work that I do... One was, just
being a little child and going to the supermarket in the
neighborhood and there being a picket of United
Farm Workers. Picketing, at the time, grapes. And I
didn't know what that was about and started
asking them about it. And they were saying, well, they
were farmers and they were treated badly, and
I thought, well, that's not good! And then in high school I
started reading, and started realizing that there was
something very important, and that
it somehow touched me.
I was able to convince originally Nike, but later on other
companies like Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola,
most recently Apple, to share with me their data.
Given that governments aren't doing their job, they
have created their own system of private regulation.
They get their suppliers to sign codes of conduct,
and then to make sure that their suppliers are actually
doing that, they actually go audit the factories to
see if they are in compliance with the code of conduct.
And the idea is that if they are, then you keep on
working with them, and if they aren't, you sort
of chastise them and tell them they've got to get their
act together, and if they eventually don't, you're
supposed to pull your orders out of those factories.
And I convinced these companies to share with me all
of those factory audit reports. And what I was
able to see is that, some of those factories actually
seemed to be okay. They treated their workers
decently, and others were far from it. So I ended up
visiting, over the course of this project in these
different sectors, 120 different factories, 10 different
countries, and did over 700 interviews.
I came up with an account that suggested 3 things: The
first one is that this compliance model, like inspecting
to make sure that they work, that things are
okay, that doesn't really work. That some factories do
improve, others never improve, but most go
in and out of compliance. The positive story was
something else was working.
And what was working was not treating these factory
managers as evil people that you had to police,
but rather managers of factories trying to do the best
they can, but often not having the right kinds of skills
and capabilities. And what I tried to demonstrate
is that there was an alternative model, that was
based much more on capability building, and kind of a
commitment, a commitment of the buyer to the supplier,
and the supplier to their workforces, and that
if you did this and treated the problem as a pedagogical
problem, as one of building trust problem, as one of
engagement, then you could actually improve the
working conditions in these factories.
Everyone said Brown students were great.
I taught a course on
"Political Economy of Labor and Development,"
that had both graduate students and undergraduate
students in it, and I was just blown away.
Here, there's tons of students who care about the things
that I care about. So my goal in the next year is I'm
going to be teaching a course on "Global
Entrepreneurship" that I'm proposing, which I'm
hoping will be political science and BEO, because
I want to attract students who might not normally think
about global affairs, and the idea was to teach
them about the world through the lens of
entrepreneurship, and then build into the course,
using the January period, for them to go and work with
an entrepreneurial firm in a developing country,
so that they'll learn about the world, they'll learn about
entrepreneurship, we'll build ties to students
who don't normally come into this building,
and I'm really looking forward to it.