Modern slavery is used by businesses to minimise costs, generate revenue and evade scrutiny of illegal practices

Genevieve LeBaron is a Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her co-authors – Andrew Crane, Kam Phung, Laya Behbahani & Jean Allain – are academics or doctoral students at various universities worldwide.

When business strategists and consulting firms talk about business model innovation, they emphasise game-changing advances that allows some firms to pull ahead of their rivals.  Most of the time, such discussions revolve around positive capacities and win-wins for businesses and customers—like how fresh expertise and new technology can lead to better customer experiences, tailored products and lower prices while boosting company profits.

But business model innovation isn’t always this rosy. A dark side exists. Such wholesale changes in practices can also be profoundly negative for both workers and society. In our new article published in Journal of Management Inquiry, we uncover a dark form of business model innovation: how business models have evolved to keep profiting from slave-labour following slavery’s legal abolition during the nineteenth century.  

Article from Reuters.