A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers' Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart

Abstract

In contrast to the mid-twentieth century era of transnational commerce, in which the US or European manufacturing multinationals played the leading role, twenty-first century globalization is increasingly structured by a set of retail-dominated supply chains, that of Wal-Mart first among them. This strategic shift in the locus of corporate power has arisen out of two conjoined phenomena: first, the logistical integration made possible and necessary by the revolution in information/transportation technology (bar codes, data storage, containerization, global communications), and second, the neoliberal transformation of the worldwide political economy, which in the US has facilitated the massive expansion of a low-wage, import dependent retail sector, while in coastal China it has generated a huge export-manufacturing boom. But the global supply chain linking Guangdong Province to Bentonville, Arkansas may well be an increasingly fragile one, because the proletarianization of tens of millions of Chinese peasants is unlikely to go smoothly, especially under conditions of authoritarian governance.