Suchergebnisse

Commodity chains : genealogy and review / Jennifer Bair -- Historicizing commodity chains : five hundred years of the global coffee commodity chain / Steven Topik -- Trading up the commodity chain? : the impact of extractive and labor-intensive manufacturing trade on world-system inequalities / David Smith and Matthew Mahutga -- Protection networks and commodity chains in the capitalist world-economy / Immanuel Wallerstein -- The comparative advantages of tropical commodity chain analysis / John Talbot -- From commodity chains to value chains : interdisciplinary theory building in an age of globalization / Timothy J. Sturgeon -- Global commodity chains, market makers, and the rise of demand-responsive economies / Gary Gereffi and Gary Hamilton -- Mimicking "lean" in global value chains : it's the workers who get leaned on / Kate Raworth and Thalia Kidder -- Unveiling the unveiling : commodity chains, commodity fetishism, and the "value" of voluntary, ethical food labels / Julie Guthman -- Chain (re)actions : comparing activist mobilization against biotechnology in Britain and the U.S. / William Munro and Rachel Schurman

This article traces the history of the UN Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations as a way to index the shifting geopolitical and economic landscape on which the NIEO played out. By the time the Code of Conduct was abandoned in 1992, concerns about the role of multinationals in the development process had been replaced by debates regarding its responsibility for promoting human rights. In 2003, a Sub-Commission of the UN Commission (now Council) on Human Rights proposed what might be regarded as a new code of conduct: the Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. Comparing the Draft Norms to the NIEO-era Code of Conduct illuminates a dramatic transformation in the development imaginary; The Draft Norms sought to limit corporate power, but within a broader human rights framework centered on the individual rights-bearer, whereas the Code of Conduct, and the larger NIEO project, was geared towards the realization of what the G-77 understood as a collective right to development, vested in the state.

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Adam Smith in Beijing is an ambitious sequel to the work that is widely regarded as Giovanni Arrighi's most important, The Long Twentieth Century. Much like this earlier book, Adam Smith in Beijing is a long, sweeping and provocative exploration of capitalism's past, present, and future. In The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi analyzed the 700 year history of the modern world system as a series of cycles of accumulation, each of which occurred under the auspices of a hegemonic power, and each of which included a period of material expansion followed, late in the cycle, by a shift in the locus of capital accumulation to the financial sector. Arrighi's analysis of four successive regimes—the Genoese, Dutch, British, and U.S.—drew on Braudel's concept of the "autumn of a hegemonic system," which refers to the period of financial expansion marking the maturation of a particular regime of accumulation and its eventual displacement by a new one. This perspective enabled Arrighi to understand the financialization of the world economy, proceeding apace at the time under then-President Clinton, in the context of the longue durée in which one (declining) hegemon's autumn is another (rising) hegemon's spring.

While apparel manufacturing is often considered the quintessential global industry, the regional dimension of trade and production in the textile and clothing sector is less widely noted. In this paper I discuss two macroregional production blocs: North America (defined as the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean Basin countries) and Greater Europe [which includes the European Union (EU), Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, and North Africa]. Analyzing what opportunities regionalization might provide is particularly relevant given China's increasing dominance of both the EU and US import markets in the post-Multifibre Arrangement period. Drawing on the global commodity chains literature, I discuss three dimensions around which cross-regional comparative research on the European and North American apparel sectors can be organized: (1) production model; (2) institutional context; and (3) development outcomes. Several similarities between these production blocs are noted, particularly with regard to the intraregional division of labor expressed by networks connecting firms in higher-wage and lower-wage countries and the coexistence of assembly subcontracting and full-package manufacturing in both regions, but differences include the existence in Europe of a stronger textile base and a more expansive regionalization strategy (as suggested by the Euro–Mediterranean Partnership), which may strengthen the competitiveness of the Greater European bloc vis-à-vis its North American counterpart.