The Role of SMEs in Global Production Networks

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niklas Egels-Zandén
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Organizational Fields ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Living Wages ◽  
Profit Maximizing ◽  
Distinct Role

Anti-sweatshop activists have turned global production networks (GPNs) into contested organizational fields. Although this contest has triggered the growth of an extensive literature on contested GPNs, the scholarly conversation is still limited in two important ways: First, it ignores or dismisses the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in GPNs and, second, it assumes that firms are driven solely by rational profit-maximizing motives. Based on a study of a Swedish SME’s payment of living wages at its Indian supplier, this article addresses these limitations by demonstrating how SMEs’ peculiarities allow them to assume a distinct role in contested GPNs. Furthermore, this article contributes to the scholarly conversation about living wages by providing a much-needed move beyond conceptual discussions into empirical studies of the underlying trade-offs of paying living wages.

Forging connections: The role of ‘boundary spanners’ in globalising clusters and shaping cluster evolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 030913252110387
Author(s):  
Di Wu
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Spanning ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Boundary Spanners ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Boundary Spanner ◽  
Evolutionary Economic ◽  
Cluster Evolution ◽  
Global Connections

Synthesising the endogenous-centred evolutionary economic geography perspective, and the globally oriented ‘global pipelines’ and global production networks frameworks, this article develops the ‘boundary spanner’ concept to propose a theoretical framework to illustrate how resourceful actors, as boundary spanners, globalise clusters and in turn drive cluster evolution. This framework comprises four interrelated cluster boundary-spanning functions, namely, discursive construction, innovation promotion, production coordination and market reach. This article aims to advance the cluster literature by unpacking how clusters’ global connections are constructed and maintained, conceptualising the multidimensional role of the agency of boundary spanners and demonstrating boundary spanners’ contributions to cluster evolution.

scholarly journals Crossvergence of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britta Holzberg
Keyword(s):  
Decent Work ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Employment Practices ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Local Pressures ◽  
Global And Local

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of crossvergence from international human resource management (IHRM) as a conceptual lens for understanding and analyzing the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms in global production networks (GPNs). The crossvergence perspective can particularly contribute to understanding how the agency of suppliers is influenced by the interaction of global–local dynamics. Design/methodology/approach The paper illustrates how the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices can be understood as a process of crossvergence. Subsequently, it reviews and structures insights from GPN and IHRM literature to detail the process. Findings The paper underscores the complicated role of suppliers in ensuring decent work in GPNs. Suppliers face a multitude of global and local interacting, and partially conflicting, demands. They process these demands as active agents and need to develop suitable employment practices in response. Originality/value The paper supports the nascent discourse on supplier agency in forming socially responsible employment practices. It connects different streams of literature to illuminate the perspective of suppliers, introduces IHRM insights to the debate and offers conceptual guidance for analyzing interacting global and local pressures on suppliers.

Industrial Hubs and the Industrial Labour Force in Africa and Asia

2020 ◽  
pp. 379-400
Author(s):  
Carlos Oya ◽  
Florian Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Labour Force ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Job Creation ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Sectoral Composition ◽  
Opening Up

Industrial hubs can take a number of institutional forms and vary greatly in size, sectoral composition, and degree of internal coordination. What all such hubs have in common, though, is that they concentrate industrial workers in great numbers and therefore play a key role in opening up new possibilities for organizing and negotiating industrial relations. In this chapter we examine the role of industrial hubs for light manufacturing in creating and maintaining an industrial labour force in Africa and Asia. We critically review theories for understanding industrial hubs as spaces of both job creation and labour control, and show how outcomes are in part determined by incorporation into global production networks. Drawing on a wide range of empirical evidence, we provide an overview of wages and working conditions in industrial hubs in Africa and Asia, and examine the causes and consequences of gendered labour dynamics in these spaces.

Precarious Self-Employment in India: A Case of Home-Based Own Account Enterprises

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-162
Author(s):  
Tulika Tripathi ◽  
Nripendra Kishore Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Classic Case ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
Living Wages ◽  
Home Based ◽  
Enterprise Surveys

Abstract A new thrust towards self-employment is seen in India where more than half of the labor class is fending for itself outside the ambit of any kind of employment. Global production networks (gpn s) have changed the structure of the labor market and extended precarity to almost every part of work and world. This has created a labor class that is neither proletariat nor bourgeois but a petty producer integrated in gpn s through mediators called ‘contractors.’ These producers are basically laborers who have been pushed out of the factory system and forced into self-employment. The paper has studied the trajectory of non-agricultural home-based Own Account Enterprises (oae s); a classic case of petty producers across gender and caste lines in various sectors of industry using state-organized enterprise surveys conducted in 2010–2011 and 2015–2016. It has found a vast majority of oae s earning less than half the proposed minimum wage (pmv)—a threshold similar to the idea of living wages rates. The most distressed oae s are in manufacturing, especially, textile, garment, leather, and chemical industries. The over emphasis on self-employment is shrinking the space for labor movement particularly in the global South.

Global cities and the geographical transfer of value

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Producer Service ◽  
Global Commodity Chains ◽  
Central Argument

The central argument of this article is that global cities are, due to their clustering of producer service firms, critical governance nodes in global production networks. More in particular, the article scrutinises the role of producer service firms in uneven development and, especially, in the geographical transfer of value (Hadjimichalis, 1984). Because the direct as well as the indirect mechanisms through which value is transferred geographically require the intervention of producer service firms, global cities can be theorised as governance nodes for centripetal wealth transfers along global commodity chains. Moreover, and in the context of the persisting criticism that the global city concept has a bias towards Northern/Western cities, the article argues that the claim that global cities are critical places for the organisation of uneven development also holds for cities beyond ‘the usual suspects’. Referring to cases of how producer service firms in Hamburg and Mexico City erect entry barriers to protect their clients from competition and of how they shape labour relations at the expense of employees, I have maintained that governance is, as Sassen (2010: 158) has argued, indeed ‘embedded’ into the services provided. From that follows that even ‘minor’ global cities are strategic governance places from where the transfer of wealth towards the centres of the world economy is organised.

scholarly journals The role of intermediaries in governance of global production networks: Restructuring work relations in Pakistan’s apparel industry

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamal Munir ◽  
Muhammad Ayaz ◽  
David L Levy ◽  
Hugh Willmott
Keyword(s):  
Price Competition ◽  
Adjustment Process ◽  
Production Network ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Global Production Networks ◽  
Work Relations ◽  
Professional Management ◽  
Restructuring Process ◽  
Apparel Companies

This article locates the reorganization of work relations in the apparel sector in Pakistan, after the end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quota regime, within the context of a global production network (GPN). We examine the role of a network of corporate, state, multilateral and civil society actors who serve as intermediaries in GPN governance. These intermediaries transmit and translate competitive pressures and invoke varied, sometimes contradictory, imaginaries in their efforts to realign and stabilize the GPN. We analyse the post-MFA restructuring of Pakistan’s apparel sector, which dramatically increased price competition and precipitated a contested adjustment process among Pakistani and global actors with divergent priorities and resources. These intermediaries converged on a ‘solution’ that combined and enacted imaginaries of modernization, competitiveness, professional management and female empowerment, while also emphasizing low costs and female docility. We highlight the intersection of economic, political and cultural dynamics of GPNs, and reveal the gendered dimensions of GPN restructuring. We theorize the role of these actors as a transnational managerial elite in GPN governance, who led a restructuring process that preserved the hegemonic stability of the GPN and protected the interests of western branded apparel companies and consumers, but did not necessarily serve the interests of workers.

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