Articulations of capital: global production networks and regional transformations

Abstract

This book constitutes a step away from generalized abstractions about globalization, and theoretical elaboration of the dynamics of world systems, and toward concrete analysis of the relationship between territorial processes of work, production and strategies for capturing value, and the larger, global processes of capital accumulation and governance of global production networks and global value chains. It is a welcome addition to the literature on global capitalism, and with its analytical complexity does considerably more than most works to live up to its promises. The authors are unafraid of theory, and with their encyclopedic knowledge of the interaction between financial networks, buyers, manufacturers and sub-contractors, they follow the diverse phases of development in Eastern Europe since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. At its core this is a study of the articulations (to use the word used in the title), dialectic, dialogue, tension, however one prefers to conceive of this interaction, between the global economy operationalized as finance, global retail and manufacturing buyers, private production and value chain governance, and territorial economies. The global economy thus can be seen in various forms: as the relationship between two or more geographic regions interacting under capitalist conditions—the authors utilize the concept of a spatial fix to discuss how Western European business maintained profits under conditions of global competition by sub-contracting manufacturing of garments, for example, to Eastern European firms; as the relationship between large-scale international retailers and buyers and local manufacturers; as global class relations mediated by national government and law, as well as by regional capitalists and firms; as the relationship of national governments and their development strategies with global finance and competition; and as dynamic and systemic competitive pressures resulting in changed practices and strategies by firms in different regions of the world under varying conditions, to name a few. This book manages through a sophisticated and self-confident use of theory to shed light on outcomes in Eastern Europe under rapidly changing opportunity structures in the global economy over the past 25 years.