Wither Labor in Chain Analyses? A Complimentary Approach to the Study of Commodity Chains

• In Event: 552 - Section on Political Economy of the World-Systems Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Capitalism and Wealth in the World-System

Abstract

The changing contours of the world economy have become so complex that efforts to describe, explain, and predict the process of globalization must necessarily take but one of a myriad of forms. Increasingly, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned to the analysis of commodity chains in order to make sense of the process of globalization and global production. I argue that commodity chain analyses represent one of the best avenues for interrogating the impact that globalization has on global production, local processes, and individual lives. In this essay, I will briefly describe some of the broad characteristics and tendencies of the process of globalization in an effort to highlight crucial shifts that have taken place across the globe. Next, I turn the literature on commodity chains and describe what I view as the three key trends that have emerged in the research: commodity chains, global commodity chains, and global value chains. Throughout this review, I will argue that commodity chain scholarship has increasingly moved in a more economistic direction and has lost much of its value as it was originally conceived of by world-systems analysts. I conclude the essay with a brief discussion of what is missing from the commodity chain literature, namely an explicit focus on labor, and argue in favor of a synthetic literature that combines the different approaches with ethnographic fieldwork in order to capture the insidious role that commodity chains play in disciplining the global division of labor.

Author

• Zachary Joseph McKenney, University of Tennessee