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 and linkages making up a commodity chain are approached by three major questions: the nature of the input–output structure, its territoriality (or the spatial reach of the different production and consumption activities), and its governance structure. The commodity chain approach to these three components as factors in global economic development is what distinguished it from more traditional ways of thinking about such development. Commodity chain analysis effectively shifted the focus of analyses of global development from the expansion of the territorial reach of national-level production and markets into the international sphere, toward the governance, territoriality, and input–output networks of sectors and industries, and their influence on global economic development.

Developments in production and commodity chain approaches in various directions have taken into account critiques of the original approach, as well as wider theoretical developments. The largest body of commodity chain literature centers on global commodity chains, or GCCs. GCCs, developed by Gary Gereffi and colleagues, split from Wallerstein's original conceptualization of commodity chains by focusing less on the role of the division of labor and the social reproduction of labor relations that make up the hierarchical world system and more on sectoral networks that make up global industries. The major difference between the Wallerstein-camp commodity chain analysis and the Gereffi-camp GCCs lies in the questions the researcher asks and how those questions are answered. World systems researchers approach commodity chains from a historical perspective and see globalization as rooted in the very beginnings of capitalism in the European context. GCC proponents, in contrast, see globalization as the result of [Page 361]increasingly integrated production systems characterized by producer-driven chains in which manufacturers directly control the entire chain, including its backward and forward linkages, and buyer-driven chains in which large companies or retailers coordinate the formation of decentralized production networks. Major debates emerging from this research focus on the governance of global commodity chains, especially agricultural commodity chains, and on the linkages between core and periphery and their spatiality. Said another way, there has been a particular emphasis on the conflicting spatial agendas of actors in the commodity chain, although research in the last decade has tended to focus less on structural and institutional-level commodity chains and contexts and more on sectoral and industry-specific chains. GCCs begin to reveal the complexity of commodity chain governance, but they break with the core/periphery analyses of world systems theory by placing a focus on changing industrial systems organization.

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