“The Minimum Wage Is the Maximum Wage”: How Goal Replacement Perpetuates Means–Ends Decoupling

This research examines how organizations contribute to the perpetuation of means–ends decoupling (MED) within issue-based fields organized around societal problems, under conditions of heightened field scrutiny. In such settings, organizations often profess commitment to field goals and visibly comply with institutionally prescribed practices to satisfy monitoring, reporting, and public evaluation requirements. However, many adopted goals remain underachieved, raising questions about how compliance without progress endures and how claims of commitment remain credible under transparency regimes intended to spur substantive goal pursuit. Our data came from 75 interviews with 68 brands, suppliers, and third-party organizations pursuing worker well-being in global fashion supply chains. We unveil auditability-based goal replacement as an organizational-level mechanism through which actors rhetorically foreground compliance as public evidence of commitment while narrowing internal goal pursuit to auditable thresholds that serve their core goals, thereby allowing shortfalls to persist. Self-silencing about this substitution and the instrumentalizing of shortfalls close the configuration into a self-reinforcing loop. The study advances MED scholarship by (i) showing how organizations leverage field conditions and appropriate the existing scrutiny infrastructures to advance their core goals while reproducing the means–ends gap, (ii) problematizing the authenticity of commitment claims, and (iii) explaining how goal-ineffective compliance prevails as a credible substitute for adopted goals. It also extends research on organizational responses to institutional complexity and calls for greater attention to institutional impact—that is, the realized advancement of the societal aim an institution emerged to address.