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This paper draws upon the experience of mainly women workers in the Bangladeshi apparel industry to explore whether deregulated bodies are the fundamental condition of work in the global production network (GPN). We organised the study during the first waves of Covid-19. To conceptualise how ‘deregulated bodies’ have been structured into the industry as the exchange condition of work, we draw on the work of transnational feminist and Marxist scholars. The study provides insights about how a gendered GPN emerged under the neoliberal development regime; the pattern of work and work conditions are innately linked to volatile market conditions. By documenting workers’ lived experiences, the paper enhances our empirical understanding of how workers depend upon work, and how a form of expendable but regulated life linked with work has been embedded in GPN. Our findings reveal that unlike those of other human beings, workers’ bodies do not need to be regulated by norms that enable protection from Covid-19. As for the workers, work implies earning for living and survival, so ‘live or be left to die’ becomes the fundamental employment condition, and the possibility of their death an overlooked consideration. This reality has not changed or been challenged, despite the existence of compliance regimes. We further argue that as scholars, we bear a responsibility to consider how we engage in research on the implications of such organisation practices in a global environment, when all of us are experiencing the pandemic.

Even though labour has been an important research topic in the field of economic geography for many years, up to now little has been known about transnational labour migration of highly skilled emp...

In this commentary, I endorse Töpfer’s critique on the conceptual centrality of ‘lead firms’ in the existing global production network/global financial network analyses and her argument to restore the primary role of the state in theorizing global financial integration. I suggest that the next step on the research agenda is to go beyond Chinese exceptionalism and develop an integrated politico-institutional framework that can enable critical, comparative studies of territorially variegated economic globalization.

Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This progress report parses three of these: firm-centric scholarship that increasingly incorporates disinvestment and devaluation as an empirical ‘dark side’ to global production network participation; Marxist approaches that explore the evolving relationship between global inequality and global production; and neo-Marxist studies of regional conjunctures that highlight the constraints, contingencies and colonial legacies shaping uneven development in both long-standing and new ways. While their epistemological differences and normative assumptions are mostly incommensurable, more dialogue across these positions is nonetheless warranted if scholars are to grasp the vicissitudes upending received patterns of uneven development and portending uncertain futures.

Global commodity chain, global value chain and global production network scholars have established the importance of studying lead firms and their business strategies to understand how new competitive pressures impact the organization of supply chains. In this analysis of the tobacco commodity chain, the author examines internal strategic planning documents for major cigarette manufacturers from 1960 to 2010 and identifies moments in which the lead firms shift competitive strategies. The article argues that these changes in inter-firm competition are linked, in part, to the changing demands, successes, and failures of the tobacco control movement. During each period, the movement shaped the particular opportunities and constraints facing Big Tobacco, which in turn changed the competitive dynamics amongst these firms, with important implications for other supply chain actors. This historical case of inter-firm competition among cigarette manufacturers reveals the importance of including powerful and enduring pressure groups in the study of global value chain governance – particularly global health movements and environmental movements that may have direct and indirect effects on global value chains above and beyond specific targeted campaigns.

The “network” has gained widespread acceptance within economic geography as a metaphor for economic interaction. Consistent with a global production network (GPN) approach, extractive industries are deeply embedded in political structures, physical infrastructure, and environmental conditions. We advocate for a GPN framework that emphasizes the co-operation of multiple, differentiated networks at each stage of a production network. Furthermore, the physical geography of sub-national spaces as well as trans-national spaces linking resources with destination markets imposes critical constraints on the structure and operation of oil and natural-gas extraction. We attempt to move beyond notions of a singular network encompassing all aspects of production by contextualizing extractive activities within the geopolitical economy of Arctic Russia. Our aim is twofold: to develop a more carefully articulated conception of networks based on the different economic principles and political regulation at work within different types of networks, and to show how the Russian Arctic oil and gas sector can only be adequately understood with such a nuanced approach. The Arctic case illustrates well the complex entanglement of the state and political actors in networks of firms and specialized transport systems. We first deconstruct the network concept to establish the economic principles, actors, and spaces that comprise the extractive production network, and then examine the extractive hydrocarbon networks active in Arctic Russia through this analytical lens.

This article examines the role of the informal economy in e-waste management in India employing field research conducted in the National Capital Region in 2011/12. It analyses the spatial linkages of the Indian e-waste industry with the international network of waste transfer and treatment using the global production network (GPN) framework. The article asserts that an understanding of the nature and functions of the informal sector, based on its theoretical foundations, enriches the global value chain (GVC) and GPN analyses. This is demonstrated through an analysis and discussion of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) production and processing and the (in)efficacy of legislation regulating these activities. Finally, the article locates Indian waste processing within the global architecture of e-waste movement and management and reflects on diverse perceptions of waste.

The concept of corporate social responsibility has been widely discussed in academia in the past decades. Most often, however, this debate has taken place in the traditional hierarchical and structural boundaries of global economy, limiting it to certain contradictory perspectives, swaying between a business-management and a critical-normative approach. This article argues that there is an urgent need of studying the concept from a different angle. Using a power perspective and basing it on authors such as Michel Foucault, David Harvey and others, it discusses the hypothesis that the current theoretical framework of the concept ‘corporate social responsibility’ is subject to a strong imbalance and a structural misalignment and is – despite its allegedly benevolent intentions – perfectly blending into the hegemonic construction of our global economy with its dominant axis between the ‘West and the Rest’. The article concludes with propositions for further research on the topic.

The origins of this Special Issue lie in a stream organized at the International Labour Process Conference (ILPC) held in Stockholm in 2012. The editors' interest in this area emerged from work on the retail supply chain (Newsome, 2010), call centres and business process outsourcing (Taylor, 2010), and spatiality, work and employment (Rainnie et al., 2011). The underlying rationale for the stream was to attract papers that situated labour and the labour process within the global commodity chain (GCC), global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) frameworks. The articles in this collection reflect different positions and divergent approaches in their attempt to integrate labour. We now provide some necessary context for understanding the debates with which they engage.

In this report, I use the organizing device of the A–Z to present a critical review of recent work under the banner of global production networks (GPN). The report positions GPN analysis in its broader intellectual context, profiles its distinctive contributions, and details a range of challenges that remain to effective economic-geographical theorizations of globalization dynamics and their impacts.

The concept of embeddedness has gained much prominence in economic geography over the last decade, as much work has been done on the social and organizational foundations of economic activities and regional development. Unlike the original conceptualizations, however, embeddedness is mostly conceived of as a ‘spatial’ concept related to the local and regional levels of analysis. By revisiting the early literature on embeddedness in particular the seminal work of Karl Polanyi and Mark Granovetter and critically engaging with what I will call an ‘overterritorialized’ concept, a different view on the fundamental categories of embeddedness is proposed. This reconceptualization then is illustrated using the poststructuralist metaphor of a rhizome to interpret the notion of embeddedness and its applicability to different geographical scales.