Commodity Chains

A commodity chain encompasses a set of interrelated activities associated with the production of one good or service such as manufacturing, consumption, design, retailing, marketing, and advertising. In commodity chain analyses, the economy is conceptualized as an assemblage of individual chains, each possessing a unique logic, organization, and spatiality. Using the lens of the commodity chain, geographers have explored the dynamics of production and consumption in a range of commodities, including fashion, furniture, footwear, gold, diamonds, fruits, vegetables, coffee, chocolate, and cut flowers. The focus is on the vertical relationships between buyers and suppliers of a particular product, tracing the flow of material resources, value, finance, and knowledge—as well as signs and symbols—between sites along a chain. Processes of coordination and competition among actors operating at the same node or function are given less weight. This tradition thus marks a break with horizontal approaches to the economy, which focus on general activities such as retailing or on one stage in the life of a commodity such as manufacturing.

The notion of a commodity chain is related to a number of similar concepts that also involve tracing connections between interrelated sites, such as filieres, global value chains, systems of provision, circuits, and actor-networks. The growing attractiveness of this methodology relates to a broader “cultural turn” in human geography, which aims to bring together economy and culture, production and consumption, and the material and the symbolic. The interest in commodity chains can also be traced to a growing political concern among consumers with the origins, quality, and ethics of products and with the vast distances and inequalities that often separate producers and consumers. A key problem is that the images and meanings of consumer goods often contain few traces of the production processes and environments that created them. The aim of a commodity chain analysis is to uncover these connections.