How Digital Technologies Impact Tolerance to Modern Slavery in Supply Chain Networks : An Institutional Theory Perspective

This study develops a socio-technical model to understand the tolerance level of modern slavery in firms across supply chains. The regulative, mimetic, and normative pressures have been incorporated as network characteristics induced by digital technologies. Our model institutionalizes the role of digital technology in transforming these pressures to affect the tolerance to modern slavery. We have combined agent-based simulation on networks, adopting a complex system perspective, with discrete choice methods, an established economic theory, for simulating numerous organizational choices with respect to tolerance level as a function of network pressures to model tolerance of modern slavery in supply chain network. In this theory paper, we study the impact of organization-specific and general-purpose technologies on tolerance due to their effect on each kind of pressure. Our findings suggest that the proposed simulation model with network pressures based on empirical data captures the real-world tolerance distribution and tolerance in the supply chain network is sensitive to each kind of technology. The sensitivity of tolerance is highest in response to the organization-specific digital technology inducing regulatory pressure, followed by general-purpose technology affecting normative pressure