Global Production Chains (HRACS) Flashcards
What is commodity fetishism?
Economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade
What is a commodity chain?
Traces the entire trajectory of a product.
Design -> production -> retailing -> consumption.
Each node value is added or profits are generated.
What are the two main types of commodity chains?
Producer-driven chains and buyer-driven chains.
Whats a producer driven chain?
Murray and Overton, 2005
Trans-national corporations control the mode of production and the overall direction of the chain, e.g Boeing.
High barriers of entry because require capital and technology intensive production and economies of scale.
Whats a buyer driven chain?
Murray and Overton, 2005
Manufacturing firms without factories who operate at the centre of a highly flexible and global network of production, distribution and marketing, e.g Nike, Walmart.
Geared toward labour intensive industries where it is important to locate production in lower-wage areas, e.g clothing in Bangladesh.
How is a buyer driven chain affected by place?
Sweden has a Mcdonald’s like every other country but because Sweden has strict laws on minimum wage the food is very expensive.
Why do people spend more money on products than they arguably need to
The main answer is that certain products offer additional value to consumers because they say things about the people who own and display them.
A car is not just a machine to get from point A to point B. Pulling up in a brand new BMW instead of a 15 year old Honda suggests, in a symbolic way, that this person has money and style beyond a simple utilitarian need to get around town.
A commodity chain has a beginning and an end is flawed
Lepawsky and Mather (2011)
In Dhaka, all ‘electronic-waste’ had value and was being bought and sold, assembled, disassembled and reassembled…
A commodity chain is characterised by four features.
Murray and Overton, 2005
1) the flows of commodities from each point in the node
2) the utilisation of labour at each point on the node
3) the mode of production at each node
4) the geographic location of the nodes
Buyer driven chain Nike example
Nike designs, markets and sells products but they don’t make a single shoe or piece of clothing on their own
The role of place in the chain
Coe et al (2008)
Although global production networks or chains are social and cultural phenomena, their configurations and characteristics are shaped by geography and the specific social, political and cultural circumstances in which they exist.
Connections between sites along the chain
Leslie and Reimer (1999)
Geography plays a central role in tracing connections between sites along the chain and in revealing the complex implications of consumer actions.
Why has a lot of car manufacturing moved from the US and UK to China or Korea?
Cost of labour was cheaper at that time.
Extra cost of shipping cars from China to the US is outweighed by the savings they get from having cheaper labour costs in China or more recently Mexico.
Nation states have lost power?
Coe et al. (2008)
It is often argued that nation states have lost power in the age of globalisation, they can in fact exert a powerful influence of global firms and global consumers.
E.g. car making in China
The difference between the material value of commodities and their symbolic value.
E.g cost of making Jordans is £10 but can sell for…
Pulling up in a brand new BMW instead of a 15 year old Honda suggests, in a symbolic way, that this person has money and style beyond a simple utilitarian need to get around town.
