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While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores...
This theme issue introduction profiles the small but growing body of research that explores the connections between global production networks, labour and development. It does so in three stages. First, it outlines key ongoing global trends relating to the functional and spatial fragmentation of production and consumption processes. Second, it considers the potential for worker agency within shifting...
Global Production Networks (GPNs) offer the possibility of a nuanced and encompassing account of how value is created and distributed in productive systems that span the globe. This paper argues, however, that there are ultimately limits to the vision of even the most finely tuned ‘network’ approach, and these become especially apparent when the concept of development is introduced. Taking development...
This paper aims to stretch the GPN approach through investigating a second-hand trade network. One of the understudied geographies of the world economy is the large-scale international trade in second-hand clothes which are exported from the Global North to Africa. Clothing collected by charities and commercial recyclers is sold in the developing world. This article examines how secondhand clothing...
The globalization of markets and the increased outsourcing of production have given rise to global production networks (GPNs) linking internationally branded companies in the West to vast networks of suppliers, contractors and workers in developing countries and countries in transition. However, the literature on GPNs has only recently begun to pay more detailed attention to conceptualizing the role...
This article starts with the recognition that labour has received less than its fair share of empirical and analytical attention in scholarship on global production networks. Little is known about how jobs for export markets fit into workers’ wider livelihoods strategies, or how workers react to new employment opportunities available to them. Based on evidence from the Tiruppur garment cluster in...
Civil society organisations are employing both adversarial and collaborative strategies to challenge purchasing practices of large corporations as a cause of poor employment conditions for a largely female workforce. This paper draws on analysis of global production networks, labour agency and gender to examine linkages and tensions at the intersection between commercial dynamics of dominant firms...
This article presents an analysis of slave labour (as it is known in Brazil) among sugar cane workers within a globalising production network. It employs the Global Production Network (GPN) framework to argue that the dynamics of production networks are fundamental to the reproduction of unfree and degrading labour in this case. First, the power exercised by buyers is a key aspect of processes resulting...
This article examines the production and transnational export of Ghanaian football labour. It does so via a cross-disciplinary approach that utilises perspectives rooted in the sociology of development (global value chains) and economic geography (global production networks). The article is underpinned by two central arguments. Firstly, it contends that the GVC framework is useful in accounting for...
In this paper we review the implications of neoclassical economic framings within the interdisciplinary field of land-change science. We argue that current pressing global environmental problems, such as land grabs, loss of critical carbon sinks and the increasing importance of corporate actors in land-use decision-making, necessitate a reconsideration of neoclassical conceptualizations of what the...
The fragmentation and dispersion of productive activities and the emergence of global production networks (GPNs) as key organisational structures for managing production and trade at a global scale has received growing attention over the past two decades. The role of trade policy and preferential trade regimes in shaping these production networks has been documented in this literature. Our understanding...
An enduring focus of scholarly work on global production networks (GPNs) is the process of insertion into production networks and the capacity of places to shape their manner of inclusion. Sometimes overlooked are ways in which these insertions are based on an evolving set of exclusions. A disarticulations perspective trains our attention on the mutual interplay between moments of inclusion and exclusion...
The governance of labour in global production networks (GPNs) has become a critical area of concern amongst academics and policymakers alike. To date, GPN research has focused on the role of private company codes and multi-stakeholder ethical initiatives primarily driven by lead-firms. Other GPN studies highlight the critical role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in challenging lead-firm purchasing...
In recent theorization of the Global Production Network (GPN) framework, viz. “GPN 2.0 theory” (Coe and Yeung, 2015), firm-specific strategies namely intra-firm coordination, inter-firm control, inter-firm partnership and extra-firm bargaining are conceptualized to understand the changing dynamics and reconfiguration of global production networks. Drawing upon the extra-firm strategies in the GPN...
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