Governance of Global Value ChainsDIIS researchers edit Economy & Society special editionPeter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte, together with Jennifer Bair of Yale University, have edited a special edition of the prestigious journal Economy & Society, published this week. The special edition’s subject is The Governance of Global Value Chains. Global value chain analysis is an internationally-recognised methodology for understanding the dynamics of contemporary international trade, which the editors have been at the forefront in pioneering. The issue of chain governance has been at the heart of discussions concerning how value chains differ from one another, how they develop over time, how entry barriers to them increase or fall, and how businesses in developing countries can achieve viability within them. The collection opens with a critical overview of approaches to global value chain (GVC) governance, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and the extent to which GVC analysis of governance should be regarded as a theory or simply a methodology. Another paper by Gibbon and Ponte, based on a case study of the supply management techniques in the US manufacturing sector, questions some basic assumptions of the approach by asking whether GVC governance is better understood as a managerial and academic discourse rather than a description of actual practices followed by firms. Other papers in this pioneering collection look at the relation between GVC analysis and other sociological and economic approaches to how networks are governed; at the relation between corporate governance and GVC governance; and at the relation between the rise of GVCs for consumer goods linking the US with China is connected with broader long-terms patterns of structural change in the US financial and economic systems. |
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