As the shortcomings of the traditional compliance model became increasingly apparent, scholars and practitioners alike began to embrace an alternative approach to combating poor labor standards in global supply chains, built around the concept of capability building (sometimes referred to as capacity building). The capability-building model starts with the observation that factories throughout the developing world often lack the resources, technical expertise, and management systems necessary to address the root causes of compliance failures. Whereas the traditional compliance model sought to deter violations by policing and penalizing factories, capability building aims to prevent violations by providing the skills, technology and organizational capabilities that enable factories to enforce labor standards on their own. By providing suppliers with the technical know-how and management systems required to run more efficient businesses, this approach aims to improve these firms’ financial situations, thus allowing them to invest in higher wages and better working conditions. At the same time, for these factories to run more “lean” and/or “high-performance” operations, management must not only reorganize work but also up-skill and perhaps even empower shop-floor workers (e.g., to stop the line when identifying persistent quality problems). Capability-building programs envision a mutually reinforcing cycle in which more efficient plants invest in their workers and that these more skilled and empowered employees, in turn, promote continuous improvement processes throughout the factory, rendering these facilities more and more efficient and therefore more capable of producing high-quality goods on time, at cost, in the quantities desired by ever-more demanding customers, while at the same time respecting corporate codes of conduct.