🧐 About

[W]e have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories (Arjun Appadurai 1986, p.5).

As mainstream public concern emerged in the Global North in the 1990s about sweatshops and trade injustice in the Global South (see Bannister & Bergan 2023), the work of social scientists including Arjun Appadurai (1986), Cynthia Enloe (1989), David Harvey (1990), Doreen Massey (1991) and George Marcus (1995) emerged to help out. In different ways, each found limiting the ethnnographic convention of studying social life in one place and understanding what happens there in the context of a wider abstract ‘system’. For them, the ‘system’ included other people’s places, and it was the connections between these places – and the people who lived and worked in them – that needed studying (see Marcus & Fischer 1986).

One way to make these connections was to ‘follow the things’: to identify, study and make public the hidden social relations between the people who grow, mine, manufacture, ship, sell, buy, use and waste specific commodities. Once the audiences for this work could see these social relations, they would understand their dependence on, and responsibilities towards, distant others and treat them the same way they would treat their friends, family members and neighbors closer to home (see Harvey 2010). This became the logic of ‘follow the things’ trade justice activism.

But research on the consumption of this activism found that audiences could get just as angry with the activists who were making them feel guilty about their bad shopping behaviour as they got with the corporations who were exploiting their supply chain workers (see Sandlin & Milam 2008). Others argued that this work too often set up middle class people in the Global North as both the cause of, and the cure for, the trade injustices suffered by workers in the Global South (see Chouliaraki 2011, Siddiqi 2009). Others argued that following things shouldn’t stop at their purchase and use, but continue through their journeys as waste (see Gregson et al 2010, Balayannis 2020, and our ♻️ recycle my waste department). Still others argued that even the most recent ‘follow the thing’ research and trade justice activism relied too much on an academic literature that was published when global capitalism was simpler and the internet was in its infancy (typically Appadurai 1986, Harvey 1990 and Marcus 1995: see Hulme 2017). During the decade in which the academic cornerstones of follow the thing studies was published, email had become a popular means of communication and a forwarded email exchange in 2001 between a student and Nike became the first example of trade justice activism to go ‘viral’ (see our page on the ‘Nike Email Exchange‘). At that time, most audiences knew little about – and could be easily shocked by – sweatshops and labour exploitation (Hulme 2017) and corporations and governments could be shamed into action by revelations of trade injustice in their supply chains (Koul 2025). Partly due to trade justice activism’s successes, circumstances have changed. Its tried and tested theories and tactics may no longer work.

Despite these challenges, ‘follow the things’ research and activism is still going strong, with relentless NGO campaiging to improve workers’ rights in supply chains (see the work of NGOs like Global Labor Justice, Fashion Revolution and the Clean Clothes Campaign and join with others), activism that works with and is led by supply chain workers themselves (see the tactics: start somewhere different, flip the script & workers take the mic!) and – it seems – fresh waves of innovative ‘follow the thing’ research tackling important 21st Century issues (see, for example, Tsing 2015, Sodero 2019, Cowen 2020, Cullen 2020, Crutchlow & Cook 2022, Taffel 2023, Ouma 2023, Liu 2024 and the tactics: include the digital and track and trace). Activists, researchers and students continue to be motivated to ‘follow the things’ that matter to them and to others elsewhere. For us, no other approach provides such an accessible entrypoint into complex understandings of trade injustice and who and what can effectively counter it.

The ‘follow the things’ approach 🤝 trade justice activism – deliberately, but also by accident. As Marcus says in his 1995 essay, getting to know people who live and work in separate parts of a supply chain, and then piecing these lives together in a single joined-up narrative can disrupt not only your own sense of self as a researcher but also those of the people featured in that narrative. Seeing your previously unknown interdependencies with (and, with them, responsibilities for) distant others can change a person (see the tactic: show it back). It’s often easiest and most common to include in ‘follow the thing’ work the lives of the poorest and most powerless people along a supply chain – typically farm and factory workers (see the tactic: find a character) – and the people who buy the things they make (either as the imagined audience and/or as characters confronted with images of people making their cheap stuff – see the tactics: involve consumers). But when you can also include those of company executives and CEOs making the demands that affect and profit from the labour of supply chain workers and the manufactured desires of consumers, the impact can be extraordinary (see the tactic bring managers into view).

What we have learned through this followthethethings.com project is that effective ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism has to pay just as much attention to the relationships between the producers and consumers of that activism as it does to the relationships between the producers and consumers of the commodities it follows. The classic blaming, shaming and guilting of ‘consumers’ for buying commodities made cheaply by exploited workers treats trade injustice as caused more or less only by ‘unethical’ shopping choices. But, if you want to improve supply chain workers’ pay and conditions, your activism will need see responsible actors everywhere and find mutiple ways to encourage multiple audiences to change corporate and government behaviour (see Young 2003). It should not only blame, and make resposible, ‘the consumer’. It should start somewhere different, choose the right thing, target the right brand and the right audience, have a theory of change, know your history and join with others to make its contribution.

followthethings.com’s CEO Ian got caught up in these debates as a student in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Teaching a traditional ‘Lands and peoples of the Non-Western World’ module as a Masters student at the University of Kentucky in the late 1980s, he found it frustrating to present these lands and peoples as distant and separate from his (bored) students. What if there were things which they owned and relied upon that were made by people in these lands? What if there were people who studied these relationships and you could ask your students to read their work? Ian wanted to be one of these people and ended up at Bristol University undertaking a multi-sited ethnographic PhD research along a fresh papaya supply chain connecting the lives of farm workers in Jamaica to supermarket buyers in the UK (Cook et al 2017).

He published a paper called ‘Follow the thing: papaya’ (Cook et al 2004) that captured what he’d found and wanted to say. Its composition couldn’t be inspired by academic writing at the time (there was very little of it). Instead, he turned to a documentary film that followed canned pineapples (Amos Gitai’s 1983 Ananas (pineapple): see Cook, Crang & Thorpe 1996) and social sculpture that followed fresh bananas (Shelley Sacks’ 1996 Exchange Values: images of invisible lives: see Cook et al 2001). Both presented their narratives in short accessible chunks, leaving audiences to figure out the connections between them, to add their own perspectives, and to become part of the work’s sense-making process (see the tactic: make it incomplete). As the production of ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism – films, books, art work, journalism, music, pranks, academic research, etc. – began to mushroom in the late 1990s, Ian focused his research and teaching on gathering and researching these many examples as a genre in this database called followthethings.com (see Cook et al 2017). It first opened in 2011, and its design and content was updated in 2025. It’s now a database of over 100 examples of the making, reception and impacts of trade justice activism. And a work that’s still in progress.