Production Network Approach Research Articles

Incorporating Aspects of Institutionalist Theory into GPN Analysis: The Case of Brazilian Oil

The analytical tools provided by the global production network (GPN) approach may not be equal to the complexity of the strategic coupling process, as they fail to address the extra-GPN forces involved, such as temporary coalitions and geopolitics. With this in mind, the analytical framework proposed here incorporated variables from historical institutionalism (HI) into the GPN analysis, which was then applied (using documentary analysis and interviews) to the specific case of Brazil’s coupling to the oil GPN. That analysis revealed that incorporating elements from historical institutionalism into the GPN framework enriched the latter by expanding its ability to explain the strategic coupling process beyond the lead-firm-centred analysis. In the Brazilian case, it could be seen how extra-GPN forces, such as ideas and international position, played a key role in the strategic coupling process.

How much remains? Local value capture from tourism in Zambezi, Namibia

High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natural resources, which are then transferred to tourism investors and trophy-hunting companies. Thus, conservancies partly determine tourism’s developmental outcomes on a local level. By applying a global production network (GPN) approach, the objective is, first, to assess how much of the turnover generated in the Zambezi region remains in the region and, second, to examine the extent to which conservancies, as newly formed local institutions, enable communities to capture value from tourism. A mixed-methods approach is applied, using a business survey, qualitative interview data and financial reports which allow a calculation of value capture. Roughly 20% of the value generated by the tourism industry in the Zambezi region is captured locally. In addition, conservancies play a key role in the GPN, acting as hinges between the local and the global: conservancies are involved in the production of the resource, mediate in strategic coupling processes and use regulatory and bargaining power to capture value. Conservancies therefore have the potential to increase local gains from tourism. On the one hand, these results underline the importance of local institutions for value capture in GPN analysis. On the other hand, as local linkages are limited and the level of local ownership is low, policies are needed that ensure the participation of local residents beyond direct transfer payments from private enterprises to communities.

Global production networks and natural resource extraction: adding a political ecology perspective

Abstract. The article examines how to adapt the global production network (GPN) approach to situations of natural resource extraction. Based on an integration of a political ecology perspective into GPN research, we exemplarily apply the GPN framework to the primary sector. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork regarding Argentine lithium mining and Brazilian soy agribusiness we illustrate that particularly a political ecological environmental perspective allows for a more nuanced and critical analysis of ambiguous local development outcomes. While from a purely economic development perspective in both cases the economic activity (integrated into GPNs) is celebrated as an imperative economic growth driver, our framework helps identify the emergence of unilateral dependencies, a decline of social autonomy and an unequal distribution of environmental risks.

Natural Gas Production Networks: Resource Making and Interfirm Dynamics in Peru and Bolivia

Economic geographers have largely shown concern about the interaction between extractive industries and local economies by studying how lead firms create economic linkages with national firms. From a global production networks approach, this work looks to deepen the understanding of interfirm dynamics in extractive industries. This work has a critical position over previous research, however, because such contributions do not consider how resources are socioecologically produced. This article shows that the socioecological relations that make natural gas an exploitable resource are critical to study the articulation between global and local firms. The contingent interaction between states, firms, and the biophysical properties of nature set up the conditions for interfirm dynamics because it creates (or does not create) a steady and continuous demand of services to perform specialized activities. This was the case in Bolivia where the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990 s, the massive involvement of lead firms, and the characteristics of natural gas deposits created conditions to develop industry-specific suppliers. Conversely, Peru has not been able to appraise its natural gas reserves and did not set up conditions for such suppliers. Therefore, the resource-making process is crucial for studying how global production networks and extractive industries are shaping the geography of uneven development.

The Invisible Networks of Global Production: Re-Imagining the Global Value Chain in Legal Research

Abstract Reviewing the burgeoning legal scholarship on global value chains to delineate the legal image of the global value chain and then comparing this legal image with images on global production in neighbouring social sciences research, in particular the Global Commodity Chain/Global Value Chain and the Global Production Network approach, this article reveals that legal research strongly aligns with the value chain image, but takes less account of the production-centric network image. The article then outlines a research agenda for legal research that departs from a network perspective on global production. To that end, it proposes that re-imagining the law in a world of global production networks requires a focus in legal research on the legal construction of global production and its infrastructure and a stronger contextualization of governance obligations and liability rules in the light of the issue-specific legal rules that apply to said infrastructure.

Rights, Risks and Responsibilities in the Recruitment of Children within the Global Football Industry

This paper examines children’s engagement with the increasingly global and commercialised football industry. By combining a Global Production Network approach and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child it is argued that, for children’s rights and best interests to be better upheld and realised within the football industry, regulatory conditions need to account for geographical contextuality and incorporate scope for children to inform regulatory frameworks and practice. The paper highlights the importance of designing and implementing research that recognises and operationalises children’s agency, which can both inform and influence regulations and practices, better to reflect children’s best interests.

Re-articulating labour in global production networks: The case of street traders in Barcelona

The global production network approach constitutes a relational theorising of production processes, incorporating firm and non-firm actors, including the state, civil society and labour. Despite re...

Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand

Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geography—two literatures rarely in conversation with one another—we reveal the links between new, globalized, cross-border articulations of poverty and prosperity and the sand trade. We situate our sand case in Southeast Asia across three sites, namely, in Singapore, the world’s top sand importer; Cambodia, a top-ten global exporter of sand; and an emerging exporter, Myanmar. We examine how sand mining affects, directly and indirectly, a range of livelihoods, specifically fisheries in Cambodia, riverbank agriculture in Myanmar, and migrant labor in Singapore. Drawing on our empirical work, we argue that linking these two literatures with empirical data on sand provides an approach that is broad in its connections and simultaneously grounded in specific practices, places, and people. This enables us to better account for often overlooked aspects in the production, erosion, and transfer of value. Key Words: global production networks, livelihoods, precarity, sand mining, Southeast Asia.

Rethinking Path Creation: A Geographical Political Economy Approach

A burgeoning strand of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) research is addressing questions of regional path creation, based on the idea that place-specific legacies and conditions play a critical role in supporting the emergence of new economic activities. Yet there has been little effort thus far to take stock of this emerging body of research. In response, the aims of this article are to offer a fresh synthesis of recent work and to develop a broader theoretical framework to inform future research. First, it presents a critical appraisal of the state of the art in path creation research. In an effort to address identified gaps in EEG research, this incorporates insights from sociological perspectives, the global production networks approach, and transition studies. Second, the article’s development of a systematic theoretical framework is based on the identification of key dimensions of path creation and their constitutive interrelations. This contribution is underpinned by a geographical political economy (GPE) approach that provides the ontological basis for the integration of the five key dimensions of path creation within an overarching framework and the positioning of regional processes in relation to the broader dynamics of uneven development. Informed by GPE, the argument is that knowledgeable actors, operating within multiscalar institutional environments, create paths through the strategic coupling of regional and extraregional assets to mechanisms of path creation and associated markets. To inform further research, the article outlines four concrete propositions regarding the operation of path creation processes in different types of regions and explores these through case studies of Berlin and Pittsburgh.

The Origins of Firm Heterogeneity: A Production Network Approach

The Origins of Firm Heterogeneity: A Production Network Approach

Filtering strategic coupling: territorial intermediaries in oil and gas global production networks in Southeast Asia

AbstractThe Global Production Network (GPN) approach has not yet considered the importance of territorial intermediaries for strategic coupling. This article demonstrates how the prospects of strategic coupling for the case of Vietnam and Indonesia with the oil and gas GPN are affected by the gateway role of Singapore. Based on interviews, the analysis reveals how Singapore influences regional economic development along the GPN through different filtering mechanisms, limiting the potential for strategic coupling for Vietnam and Indonesia. For GPN research, the identified filtering mechanisms illustrate how the territoriality of GPNs contributes to differentiated territorial outcomes. The findings therefore indicate the need to intensify the appreciation of the particular territorial configuration of GPNs as this yields considerable explanatory power for understanding the unequal contours of the global economy.

Configuring floating production networks: A case study of a new offshore wind technology across two oil and gas economies

ABSTRACTThe authors employ the global production network (GPN) approach to analyse the development of the renewable energy sector. Through a case study of the development of a Hywind floating offshore wind project (Hywind) across two oil and gas economies, namely Norway and Scotland, the paper sheds light on the key drivers and role of core GPN actors. Methodologically, the authors investigate the process from both ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ perspectives, referring to the efforts of firms expanding into overseas markets and the efforts of host countries to attract investment from outside their territories. The analysis shows how the configuration of extractive production networks is shaped by the interactions between the network development practices of firms and the market development strategies of host states. The authors conclude that the distinct materiality of floating wind power technology shapes the territorial configuration of the production network by enabling its spatial extension across a range of locations. By contrast, existing research on other extractive sectors has emphasized the spatially constraining effects of materiality (Bridge 2008).

Trabalho e ação sindical em Redes Globais de Produção

O artigo pretende fazer um balanço da incorporação do trabalho e da ação coletiva sindical à abordagem das redes globais de produção (RGPs) e de seus limites e potencial para o desenvolvimento de uma concepção sociológica multiagente e multiescalar do mundo do trabalho. Partindo da organização em rede das estratégias corporativas e seus impactos sobre as condições e relações de trabalho, a intenção é aprofundar o entendimento: (1) da conformação de redes laborais dispersas geograficamente, embora funcionalmente integradas; (2) do impacto destas sobre as formas de agência individual de trabalhadores, em suas variadas segmentações etária, étnica, de gênero e geográfica; e (3) das restrições e oportunidades à emergência de formas de ação e poder coletivo transnacionais condicionantes da agência econômica e política e influentes sobre a forma concreta dessas redes.

Path creation, global production networks and regional development: A comparative international analysis of the offshore wind sector

The question of how regions and nations develop new sources of industrial growth is of recurring interest in economic geography and planning studies. From an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) perspective, new growth paths emerge out of existing economic activities and their associated assets and conditions. In response to the micro-economic and endogenous focus of much EEG research, this paper utilises a broader evolutionary perspective on path creation which stresses the dynamic interplay between four sets of factors: regional assets; key economic and organisational actors; mechanisms of path creation; and multi-scalar institutional environments and policy initiatives. Reflecting the importance of extra-regional networks and institutions, this framework is also informed by the Global Production Networks (GPN) approach, which highlights the process of strategic coupling between firms and regions and its political and institutional mediation by state institutions at different spatial scales. We deploy this framework to investigate regional path creation in the context of renewable energy technologies, focusing specifically on the offshore wind industry. We adopt a comparative cross-national approach, examining the evolution of offshore wind in Germany, the UK and Norway. Of the three cases, Germany has developed the most deep-rooted and holistic path to date, characterised by leading roles in both deployment and manufacturing. By contrast, path creation in the UK and Norway has evolved in more partial and selective ways. The UK’s growth path is developing in a relatively shallow manner, based largely upon deployment and ‘outside in’ investment, whilst Norway’s path is emerging in an exogenous, ‘inside-out’ fashion around a fairly confined set of actors and deployment and supply functions. In conclusion, the paper emphasises the important role of national states in orchestrating the strategic coupling of regional and national assets to particular mechanisms of path creation.

The Origins of Firm Heterogeneity: A Production Network Approach

This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized facts that motivate a model in which firms buy inputs from upstream suppliers and sell to downstream buyers and final demand. Larger firm size can come from high production capability, more or better buyers and suppliers, and/or better matches between buyers and suppliers. Downstream factors explain the vast majority of firm size heterogeneity. Firms with higher production capability have greater market shares among their customers, but also higher input costs and fewer customers. As a result, high production capability firms have lower sales unconditionally and higher sales conditional on their input prices. Counterfactual analysis suggests that the production network accounts for more than half of firm size dispersion. Taken together, our results suggest that multiple firm attributes underpin their success or failure, and that models with only one source of firm heterogeneity fail to capture the majority of firm size dispersion.

Globalization and the water-energy-food nexus – Using the global production networks approach to analyze society-environment relations

The interrelation of the water-energy-food nexus and processes of globalization has to be understood thoroughly in order to address socio-economic inequalities and environmental change. However, unravelling the complexities of the water-energy-food nexus in the context of globalization poses conceptual and empirical difficulties. Economic globalization, e.g. through transnational trade and foreign direct investment, results in a global conjunction of actors, interests and impacts, strongly affecting patterns of resource extraction and environmental degradation, and local capabilities for its governance. In environmental economic geography, the global value chain and global production networks approaches have proved useful for the analysis of interrelations between governance structures, value, institutional contexts, and modes of resource consumption. In this paper, we discuss the potential of the global production networks approach to analyze society-environment relations in the context of the water-energy-food nexus and processes of globalization. To make our argument, we will use the case of manure and digestate, which results from meat and bioenergy production in the Oldenburger Münsterland, the center of livestock farming in Germany. The region is Germany’s best developed agribusiness cluster, which is integrated into a transnational network of animal producers, feedstuff producers and meat processors. And it is also home to many biogas plants and several market leaders in bioenergy technology, strongly related to the livestock husbandry business. The case is an example of the three-way-mutual interactions among food, energy and water. The analysis will combine the perspective of the water-energy-food nexus with the analytical categories of the global production networks approach to provide a nuanced understanding of the socio-environmental implications of the global integration of a regional agri-food production cluster.

Rethinking creative industries research: Synthesizing the Creative Class thesis, clustering, and global production network approaches

AbstractIdentifying three prevalent approaches—Richard Florida's consumption‐related Creative Class thesis, clustering of the creative industries, and global production networks of these industries—to understand the geography and development of the creative industries in existing literature, this paper reviews the significance and limitations of these approaches. It argues that existing literature treat these approaches “stand alone” from each another, without acknowledging the importance of other actors and forces. Instead, these three dynamics do not function separately, but are interdependent and complementary. It points to a critical agenda for future research, arguing that it is the intersection and synergy between these three dynamics that together shapes the development of the creative industries. This paper calls for further research, first, to examine the interrelationship between the local and the global scales of the creative industries by adopting the Global Production Networks (GPN) approach and, second, to study the association between the consumption‐related urban amenities and the production of the creative industries.

Revisiting the multinational enterprise in global production networks

This paper presents further opportunities to develop the Global Production Network (GPN) approach by re-opening the ‘black box’ of the multinational enterprise (MNE) through a structuration perspective. It emphasises three aspects to a renewed focus on the agency of MNEs, namely: the importance of the variety of relationships within MNEs between parent and subsidiaries; the importance of dynamic capabilities in underpinning corporate change; and, the micro-politics of MNEs and subsidiaries which impact on firm-institutional change within regional economies. The agency exercised by MNEs in these ways influences the ‘selection’ of investment locations, ‘coupling’ processes, and the depth and pace of host territorial institutional change. In conclusion, this paper argues that future research needs to place greater emphasis on the contribution of dynamics internal to the MNE in order to understand evolution in regional economies and GPNs.

Location policy and downstream mineral processing: A research agenda

The mixed results from the recent implementation of a wave of policies that aim to encourage the downstream processing of minerals – mainly in developing countries – have highlighted the need for research to better guide and support policy-making in this area. Specifically, it is crucial to determine whether mineral producing countries can or should intervene in the processing location of minerals, and if so how to go about doing so. This paper highlights these concerns by broadening our understanding of the location determinants of downstream mineral processing. We argue that researchers must move beyond the more descriptive linkage theory and Global Value Chain (GVC) and Global Production Network (GPN) approaches to incorporate New Economic Geography (NEG) theories, to improve awareness of location decisions’ determinants. A profound understanding of these determinants is imperative to determine policy measures capable of influencing location outcomes. This must be complemented with an identification and evaluation of the policy options available to mineral producing countries in order to attract – or maintain – downstream processing.

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

ABSTRACTIntegration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.