Review and positions: Global production networks and labour

Abstract

Commodity chains that are global in extent have increasingly come to be seen as the defining element of the contemporary globalized world economy. Since the 1990s a body of theory - evolving from global commodity chain analysis to global value chain analysis to global production network analysis - has focused upon understanding how such commodity chains function. However, despite providing many important insights, these bodies of literature have generally suffered from a major deficiency in that they have failed to consider labour as an active agent capable of shaping such chains’ structure and geographical organization. Here, then, we present a case for locating more centrally labour, in production network analysis.