Editors Introduction: Commodity Chains in and of the World System

Jennifer Bair

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2014.574

Abstract

see text.

Highlights

Observing that the sequential steps involved in the creation, cultivation, and transportation of a particular good could be conceived as a commodity chain, they and their colleagues studied several specific chains to ascertain where these activities were carried out, and how the unequal returns to these activities created a stratified world-system
During the 1990s, in the context of growing academic and popular interest in what was perceived to be a novel and/ or intensified phase of globalization, the commodity chain concept grew in popularity as one of the few analytical methods available for studying the growing complexity of international production networks
Because the world-systems perspective recognizes that mobility within the world-economy is possible, as individual countries move up or down, this developmentalist turn in commodity chain research did not necessarily require a radical break with world-systems analysis

Summary

States and Commodity Chains

The study of commodity chains provides a window into one of the structural tensions of the modern world-system (and one of the orienting concerns of world-systems analysis): that between the political organization of the globe into units called states, and the worldwide division of labor that is created by linked labor and production processes transcending the boundaries demarcating these units. It is only once lead firms succeed in externalizing production to subcontractors in lower-cost countries, and use their buying power to stimulate completion among these globally dispersed suppliers, that the returns to participation approximate a zero-sum logic in which the states containing core/lead firms (and the consumers within these states) gain at the expense of the states containing peripheral/captive firms (and the workers within these states) Mahutga concludes that this variation across industries suggests that commodity chains express multiple, sector-specific logics, and as such, cannot be treated as a single, homogenous stratification mechanism

Surplus Creation and Value Capture in Commodity Chains

Commodity Chains as Political Opportunity Structures