Production and Commodity Chains

Production and commodity chains are the most persistent approach to the study of the movement of goods through production, distribution, and consumption. Commodity chains conceptually organize the paths of commodities according to the Marxian notion of the division of labor along linear nodes of production between the initial points of resource extraction to the point of final consumption. The commodity chain approach originally emerged out of Emmanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory but evolved into distinct analytical approaches in the early 1990s. In the original commodity chain approach that emerged out of political economy and world systems theory, four institutions—households, classes, peoples, and states—determine the social relations around the commodity at each node of a commodity chain. In all of the approach's varieties, the sets of nodes ...