Abstract
Transnational firms have rolled out new forms of private governance at the same time as the rise of new economic powerhouses like China has fomented growing inter-state tensions. This points to critical questions: how does inter-state competition shape private governance of transnational commodity chains and how does private governance shape inter-state rivalries? I explore these questions by tracing the construction and dissolution of sectoral hegemonic coalitions that govern commodity chains. Drawing on the case of cotton quality governance from 2000-2012, I argue that a coalition of the U.S. state and transnational merchants has reconstituted its sectoral hegemony to allow expanded accumulation and accommodate their main rival~China. The U.S. state created standards with Chinese characteristics, while transnational merchants made the authority structure of their institutions more inclusive. However, this reconstituted hegemony remains unstable. Facing continued regulatory competition from China, the U.S. state has constructed new forms of meta-governance that could facilitate a shift to Chinese-led sectoral hegemony but under U.S. oversight. Moreover, these sectoral hegemonic struggles compelled Western transnational merchants to fracture their long-standing relationship with the U.S. state in the hegemonic coalition in order to position their private institutions as geopolitically neutral and thus compatible with the hegemonic leadership of either the U.S. or Chinese states in the sector. By tracing struggles among coalitions of leading firms and states for hegemony over the institutions governing particular commodity chain sectors, we can shed light on possible trajectories within broader world-system level hegemonic struggles that at once constitute and are constituted by these sectoral dynamics.
Highlights
This study is based on multi-sited structural fieldwork, using the commodity chain as a methodological tool to track actors that are at once linked in the global cotton trade and embedded in place-specific constellations of labor, technology, culture, and business practices
The case of quality governance in the transnational cotton trade from 2000-2012 offers a lens through which to explore the intersection of two key dynamics in the global economy: the growing governance roles of transnational firms, and intensifying inter-state competition with the decline of U.S hegemony and the rise of China
By linking Arrighi's work on periods of crisis and hegemonic struggle with the study of the institutions governing commodity chains, we can chart the destabilization of hegemonic coalitions of states and firms and the state and private institutions that undergird them, as well as the contingent struggles that generate new configurations of power
Summary
Recent scholarship points to two major transformations in the governance of the global economy. A range of agencies of the U.S state has assumed a lead role in constructing the institutional foundations for expanded trade for a wide range of commodity chains This has involved providing state regulation that creates a calculable environment in which transnational firms could expand and develop complementary private governance institutions. These institutions carry with them complex and historically-specific constellations of knowledge/expertise, technology, materiality, discursive legitimations, social roles, and relationships that cannot be cast aside, transplanted elsewhere, or redirected to serve different interests in a simple and straightforward way As these different contenders for a position in the sectoral hegemonic coalition engage in hegemony-building strategies, their competitive efforts can generate new configurations of power and novel institutions that depart significantly from those characterizing the declining hegemonic coalition. The Chinese-led coalition continues to pose a threat to the stability of this reconstituted hegemony
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