Collective Success or Collective Failure? The Sialkot Football Manufacturing Industry’s Response to International Labor Standards Pressures

In this article, I make a contribution to the literature on how industrial clusters in developing countries respond to corporate responsibility demands from international buyers in Europe and North America. I outline an analytical framework that integrates insights from the global value chain, industrial cluster, and corporate social responsibility literatures with the aim of explaining why collective cluster action through industry associations and/or public private partnerships succeed or fail in facilitating cluster-wide compliance with CSR standards. I then use this framework to analyze a case study of soccer village project to learn how various attempts at facilitating joint CSR action in the Pakistani football manufacturing have consistently failed in addressing international CSR compliance demands. I conclude that this form of collective failure – along with technological changes, lack of innovation, and government failure - can partly explain why Sialkot has been marginalized in terms of its overall share of world football manufacturing in the last decade.