Child labour risk organizing communication: a longitudinal analysis of corporate narratives

Purpose: To examine how Nestlé organises and communicates its child labour risk discourse in its corporate reports.

Design/methodology/approach: Data sources include various corporate reports and media reports for the period 2011-2021. A qualitative interpretive analysis was conducted to longitudinally investigate how the company organized and communicated the discourse of child labour risk over a two-decade period.

Findings: The organization transitions through four modes of organizing risk, namely pre-prospectively, prospectively, in real-time, and retrospectively. In each identified mode of risk organizing, we have identified a strategy related to the organization’s communications about child labour risk in its own operations and supply chains. We show that the organization moves from distancing (denying the existence of) to complying (admitting the possibility of), recognizing (admitting the existence of), and remediating (correcting the occurrence of) child labour risk. These risk communication strategies are connected to how the organization circles back to prospective risk analysis in a shell-like movement. Once the organization moves from the real-time mode to the retrospective mode, the organization’s risk communication efforts feature new risk appraisal tools whilst providing the organization with a new higher profile as an expert in child labour risk assessment. We argue that the communication of risk organizing has performative effects.

Implications for policy and practice: Our findings have significant implications for the Sustainable Development Goals framework and the UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights. We argue that without radical progress in eradicating child labour from the corporate supply chains, the SDG 8.7 target of eliminating child labour by 2025 is simply not going to be achieved.

Originality/value: We build upon and extend a risk organizing framework by examining the child labour risk organizing disclosures of Nestlé. We extend the framework by adding a new mode of organizing risk – pre-prospective risk organizing.