Review of “The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry”

Abstract

The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (hereafter, The Perfect Fit) is a fascinating book that discloses how the global leather shoe industry has a network of production and consumption, stretching designers from New York to factory workers in Brazil and China. This book attempts to reveal the commodity chains of female footwear, unraveling “patterns of repetition and innovation” of the female footwear industry in the globalized economy and displaying the flow of intimate knowledge among actors the backstage, hidden in the footwear market. The author successfully shows leather shoe production is a unique case in which expert knowledge and unskilled work are combined through the global commodity chains. While the issues seem pretty familiar to sociologists, the book begins with different approaches from industrial sociology or political economy, namely cultural sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). First, the author investigates the meanings of work and common knowledge of various actors involved in the process of leather shoe production. He utilizes concepts developed in STS like “translation, inscription, invisible work, immutable mobiles, infrastructure, or boundary objects” (p. 16).