Theorising States and Firms in Global Production Networks

Abstract

The role of states and firms as sources of economic governance is a key issue for the analysis of global production networks. Unlike the nationally based industries they are increasingly replacing, global production networks span multiple national spaces and unite many economies while belonging exclusively to none. As production network governance arrangements are critical in determining how the gains from global industries are spatially distributed, this raises important questions over which actors are able to shape governance arrangements in their favour. For some, the transnationality of global production networks is argued to result in a heightened role for multinational corporations (MNCs), and a challenge to the primacy of nationally-bound state actors, in what has been described as an ‘epochal shift’ in economic governance associated with contemporary patterns of globalisation (Amoore et al. 1997: 181). Nonetheless, the purported retreat of the state from governance functions in global industries is arguably only a partial process, and the extent and nature of this state-to-firm shift remains a central and highly contested debate in contemporary international political economy (IPE) scholarship (Phillips 2005). An examination of the governance of global production networks therefore requires a coherent, explanatory, and theoretically informed analytical framework that can come to terms with the respective governance roles of states and firms.KeywordsForeign Direct InvestmentGlobal ProductionInstitutional FeatureProduction NetworkGovernance ArrangementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.