Not made in China: Integration of social sustainability into strategy at Nudie Jeans Co

Sustainability concerns have increasingly moved up the corporate agenda, and corporate managers and academics alike stress the need to integrate sustainability into corporate strategy to both create competitive advantages and mitigate sustainability problems. Despite numerous conceptual studies of how sustainability should be integrated in strategy, there are few detailed empirical studies of actual corporate attempts to integrate sustainability into strategy. In this paper, we start to fill this gap based on a study of how the Swedish SME Nudie Jeans Co address worker rights in global value chain by only sourcing from democratic countries with acceptable working conditions. We show that integration of social sustainability into strategy in global value chains is likely to be an emergent process that involves political considerations, traceability and trade-offs in product development. In doing this, we provide a starting point for future empirically grounded research into sustainability and strategy.