Geographies Of Commodity Chains

Individuals, consumer groups, nation states and supra-national bodies increasingly have interrogated the ethics of particular production and consumption relations such as GM foods. Flowing from and bound up with these political concerns is the growing interest in the mutual dependence of sites of (for example) production, distribution, retailing, design, advertising, marketing and final consumption. This timely volume draws together contributions concerned with the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. Not only do these case study examples seek to transcend older understandings of production and consumption, but they also explicitly tap into wider public debate about the meanings, origins and biographies of commodities. Taking a geographical approach to the analysis of links between producers and consumers, the book focuses upon the ways in which these ties increasingly are stretched across spaces and places. Critical engagements with the ways in which these spaces and places affect the economies, cultures and politics of the connections between producers and consumers are skilfully threaded through each section.

Transnational spatial relations offer a key point from which to study the geographies of contemporary globalization. This book assesses the possible cross-fertilization between two of the most notable analytical frameworks - the world city network framework and the global commodity chain framework. Transnational spatial relations have become a key analytical lens through which to study the geographies of contemporary globalization Brings together contributions of key researchers from different backgrounds and different parts of the world Offers a set of original approaches to the study of the networked geography of globalization

This critical introduction to consumption and its geographies provides an engaged summary of the consumption literature and demonstrates that consumption is intimately related to the production of space in everyday life. In Geographies of Consumption Juliana Mansvelt provides readers with a detailed explanation of political-economic and social-cultural perspectives on consumption at different scales. She opens with overview chapters on the history and conceptualisation of consumption and moves on to thematic chapters on consumption spaces; the body and identity; commodity chains; globalization commercial cultures. The text is illustrated throughout with comparative case study-material and features boxes and annotated notes for further reading. A review of consumption from a spatial perspective, this critical analysis of the key debates is the first synoptic overview in the geographic literature. Geographies of Consumption will be widely used in modules in economic and social geography, and should be the core text for those with a focus on consumption

Featuring new contributions by leading globalization scholars, this timely volume analyzes the organization, geography, politics, and power dynamics of international trade and production networks understood as global commodity chains.

Commodity chains link the processes of manufacturing that result in a final product available for individual consumption. This book explores the global commodity chains approach, which reformulates the basic conceptual categories for analysing patterns of global organisation and change.

Within the international agri-food community at least four theoretical targets are attracting increasing attention. They are: (1) the established notions of networks and commodity chains that are being revisited by way of critical engagement informed by the insights of in-depth empirical work, (2) the metrics of calculation and institutional embedding that underpin the rise and functionality of governance technologies, (3) the place of regional networking in creating conditions that make possible agri-food producer participation in local provisioning and supply, and (4) the geo-historical dimensions of interconnection and interdependency in the agri-food sphere. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, business and management academics and geographers to examine a wide range of case studies illustrating various agri-food commodity chains and networks around the world and to discuss how they link globally.

The current restructuring of the world-economy under global capitalism has further integrated international trade and production. It thus has brought to the fore the key role of commodity chains in the relationships of capital, labor, and states. Commodity chains are most simply defined as the link between successive processes of manufacturing that result in a final product available for individual consumption. Each production site in the chain involves organizing the acquisition of necessary raw materials plus semifinished inputs, the recruitment of labor power and its provisioning, arranging transportation to the next site, and the construction of modes of distribution (via markets and transfers) and consumption. The contributors to this volume explore and elaborate the global commodity chains (GCCs) approach, which reformulates the basic conceptual categories for analyzing varied patterns of global organization and change. The GCC framework allows the authors to pose questions about development issues, past and present, that are not easily handled by previous paradigms and to more adequately forge the macro-micro links between processes that are generally assumed to be discretely contained within global, national, and local units of analysis. The paradigm that GCCs embody is a network-centered, historical approach that probes above and below the level of the nation-state to better analyze structure and change in the contemporary world.

This book presents extensions to current commodity-flow models to analyze the economic and environmental impacts of recent structural changes, such as fragmentation of production and lengthening supply chains. The extensions enable augmented commodity-flow models to analyze the vulnerability of supply chains and regions to climate change and extreme weather events. The models allow the explicit treatment of trade in intermediate goods; the so-called “new economic geography” behavioral foundations for production and inter-industry and interregional trade; endogenous determination of capital investment and employment; and changes in emissions associated with production, consumption and freight movement. Presenting a modeling framework and simulations that are based on a thirty-year, spatial time-series of inter-industry and interstate trade in the US, this unique book is a valuable resource for regional scientists, economic geographers and transportation modelers, as well as environmental and atmospheric scientists.