This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance patterns in global value chains It draws on three streams of literature ‐ transaction costs economics, production networks, and technological capability and firm-level learning ‐ to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base The theory generates five types of global value chain governance ‐ hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market ‐ which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics

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The governance of global value chains

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Rise of the Creative Class

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

This paper sets out to explore contexts for entrepreneurship, illustrating how a contextualized view of entrepreneurship contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon. There is growing recognition in entrepreneurship research that economic behavior can be better understood within its historical, temporal, institutional, spatial, and social contexts, as these contexts provide individuals with opportunities and set boundaries for their actions. Context can be an asset and a liability for the nature and extent of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship can also impact contexts. The paper argues that context is important for understanding when, how, and why entrepreneurship happens and who becomes involved. Exploring the multiplicity of contexts and their impact on entrepreneurship, it identifies challenges researchers face in contextualizing entrepreneurship theory and offers possible ways forward.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/j_1540-6520_2010_00427_x_wml.pdf?abstractid=1784106&mirid=2

Contextualizing Entrepreneurship—Conceptual Challenges and Ways Forward:

Contemporary economic globalization as a highly dynamic process has seen substantial changes in its organization, governance, geographies and impacts. These global shifts can be characterized by – among other aspects – increased functional and geographical fragmentation of production processes, various waves of outsourcing and off-shoring, changing geographies of production and consumption and associated labour market dynamics. At the same time, nation states and regional economic blocs aim at increasing macro-regional and global integration through bilateral and multilateral trade and investment negotiations, predicated on transformations in transportation and logistics technologies that enable the functioning of complex global production networks (GPNs) and link regional, national and supra-national economies. This paper aims to assess the consequences of what has been termed a ‘logistics revolution’ for economic and social upgrading in global logistics and client sectors. It starts by charting the existing research base and exploring the structure and dynamics of the global logistics industry, before addressing the potential of and obstacles to economic and social upgrading. The analysis highlights the often-neglected importance of logistics as a global industry: a major employer and value generator in its own right, with its own evolving GPNs. It demonstrates the increasingly diverse structure of logistics operations and labour markets, creating opportunities for upgrading through innovation and new technologies, but at the same time it shows the continued prevalence of ‘low-road’ logistics labour markets and workers often struggling to secure labour rights, decent wages and improved working conditions. These issues are illustrated and discussed for both the global logistics industry itself and the logistics activities in client sectors such as horticulture, apparel and mobile communications. The paper concludes with reflections on the contingent and variegated outcomesof logistics development and avenues for future research.

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Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Logistics

The last two decades have seen a major wave of retail globalization that has driven the transformation of retail markets in the emerging economies of Southeast Asia and beyond. This article provides a systematic analysis of the divergent pathways of retail market transformation in Malaysia and Thailand through exploring the interface of foreign retailers' strategies of market development and regulatory efforts by the state. Drawing on the variegated capitalism approach and relational economic geography perspectives, the article develops a dynamic analytical framework for investigating and contrasting contestation and negotiation in the process of market transformation. Based on extensive fieldwork and comprehensive secondary data analysis carried out in Malaysia and Thailand, it demonstrates the different trajectories of the Malaysian and Thai retail markets since the turn of the millennium, and explains the political-economic context, and state-regulatory and retail firm strategies that interactively shape market change. While Malaysia has seen substantial levels of state intervention to protect domestic interests and create a two-tier retail system, the Thai retail market transformation has been based on less rigid but more geographically varied state regulation and foreign retail firm strategies. Thus, this article sheds new light on the host economy impacts of retail globalization in the context of local and national contestation and regulation. It concludes with a summary of the findings and reflections on the value of the analytical frame developed here for research on comparative capitalism beyond the retail sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Variegated National Retail Markets: Negotiating Transformation through Regulation in Malaysia and Thailand

The internationalisation of retailing: implications for supply network restructuring in East Asia and Eastern Europe

The global garment industry has long been known for poor working conditions and the endemic violation of labor rights, especially in low wage countries of the Global South. This paper draws on the global production networks (GPN) approach and the varieties of capitalism literature to discuss new forms of governance and regulation to improve labor standards in garment factories. Using the case study of the Better Factories Programme, an initiative by the International Labour Organization to improve working conditions and labor rights in the Cambodian garment industry, the level of compliance with labor standards and its variation is analyzed using a unique firm-level dataset. The results show that compliance differs significantly depending on firm ownership and also demonstrate the changes in compliance levels over time. The forms in which public and private governance develop and influence each other is also not a simple replacement of government regulation by private sector self-governance. They both combine in unique ways, thus transcending the public-private divide that is characteristic of parts of the governance literature identifying ‘regulatory gaps’ and ‘governance deficits’. GPNs are embedded multi-actor structures that link different institutional regimes and are shot through with multiple power relations which determine the outcome for securing livelihoods in the places they connect. The paper concludes by reflecting on implications for Better Work and possible avenues for future research. __________________________________________________________________________

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Global Production Networks and Variegated Capitalism: (Self-)Regulating Labour in Cambodian Garment Factories

Inspired by five commentaries on our forum article, in this response article we elaborate on three points related to geographies of dissociation, namely positioning dissociation, dealing with plurality and moving from agenda-setting to empirical research. In order to assess the validity of critique elaborated in the commentaries, we specify the contribution we seek to make. Geographies of dissociation aim to contribute to a strand of cultural economic geography that has become increasingly interested in the social construction of symbolic value but that still lacks a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the loopholes and missing links in these relational webs and their related geographies. We explain how geographies of dissociation build on pluralism without ignoring epistemological frictions. Furthermore, we discuss how geographies of dissociation might inspire political economic approaches and future empirical research.

Martin Hess

Papers

Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Logistics

Variegated National Retail Markets: Negotiating Transformation through Regulation in Malaysia and Thailand

The internationalisation of retailing: implications for supply network restructuring in East Asia and Eastern Europe

Global Production Networks and Variegated Capitalism: (Self-)Regulating Labour in Cambodian Garment Factories

Positioning and 'doing' geographies of dissociation