240121 SE VM1 / VM2 - Global Production Networks, Labour and Transnational Organising (2020S)

The global economy has changed significantly in the past decades in the context of neoliberal globalization. This change is reflected in an increase in international finance, global trade and foreign direct investment, but also in the structure of global production. Today, the global economy is increasingly structured around organizationally fragmented and geographically dispersed “global production networks” where transnational corporations break up the production process in different parts and locate them across the globe. Such global production arrangements can be found in sectors as diverse as apparel, footwear, automobiles, electronics, fruits and vegetables, flowers, coffee, cocoa, minerals, tourism and business related services.

These transformations in global production have crucial implications for how firms, producers and workers in the Global South are integrated into the global economy as well as for uneven socio-economic development outcomes. The expansion of global production networks has provided opportunities for firms and producers to enter the global economy and generated employment, particularly in labor-intensive sectors. However, the wider economic, social and environmental impacts can be very problematic, which catastrophes like the Rana Plaza collapse have demonstrated all too clearly. Global production networks have thus been widely associated with a flexible, precarious and gendered workforce. These characteristics are closely related to asymmetric power structures and inequalities intrinsic to global production networks.

Chain and network approaches assess these global production arrangements, focusing on their organization and governance structures and their implications for uneven development. While they originally focused mainly on firms and implications for economic upgrading, the social outcomes of global production and social upgrading of workers has become a focus of chain and network research in the past decade. Additionally, a recent stream of research has highlighted the role of labor agency, worker power and transnational struggles and organizing for better working conditions in global production networks.

This seminar focuses on the economic, social and uneven development outcomes of global production networks and particularly on the role of transnational organizing for better working conditions. These issues will be addressed in three steps. First, key changes in the global economy will be assessed. Thereby we concentrate on how globalized production arrangements have evolved in the past decades. Second, chain and network approaches to analyzing these changes and their economic, social and uneven development outcomes will be critically examined. The focus will be on how these approaches conceptualize labor. Third, selected case studies on transnational organizing for better working conditions along global production networks will be comparatively analyzed. In this context, we will examine their outcomes, successes and limitations in terms of changing power structures and inequalities.