Heading Home? Reshoring and Sustainability Connectedness from a Home‐Country Consumer Perspective
通过30名英国消费者的深度访谈，研究消费者如何看待企业将生产回流母国与可持续性的关系，发现消费者有条件支持回流，并质疑企业动机。
Abstract Extensive globalisation has presented several sustainability challenges highlighted in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. These include the environmental impact of global product procurement and manufacturing and the irregular treatment of indigenous workers in developing countries. Thus, reshoring, defined as a firm's voluntary strategy to partially or totally relocate production to the home country, is gaining traction. However, most research on reshoring focuses on firms, leaving the consumers’ perspective under‐researched. Here, we examine British consumers’ perspectives on reshoring to the UK and sustainability. By employing the theoretical lens of connectedness, anchored in attachment theory, we conducted 30 in‐depth interviews using projective techniques and analysed the data using the constant comparison method. We found that consumers not only positively viewed their connectedness with the concept of reshoring from a sustainability perspective, but also appraised it from a global perspective, demonstrating empathy towards the host country. Further, they doubted corporations’ motives regarding reshoring. Three theoretical dimensions emerged based on consumers’ connectedness with reshoring and sustainability, specifically, supporting reshoring conditionally, inclusive reshoring, and doubting reshoring.