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This article reviews the rapidly growing domain of global value chain (GVC) research by analyzing several highly cited conceptual frameworks and then appraising GVC studies published in such disciplines as international business, general management, supply chain management, operations management, economic geography, regional and development studies, and international political economy. Building on GVC conceptual frameworks, we conducted the review based on a comparative institutional perspective that encompasses critical governance issues at the micro-, GVC, and macro-levels. Our results indicate that some of these issues have garnered significantly more scholarly attention than others. We suggest several future research topics such as microfoundations of GVC governance, GVC mapping, learning, impact of lead firm ownership and strategy, dynamics of GVC arrangements, value creation and distribution, financialization, digitization, the impact of renewed protectionism, the impact of GVCs on their macro-environment, and chain-level performance management.

This article asks how the application of digital technologies is changing the organization of the agri-food system in the context of the third food regime. The academic debate on digitalization and food largely focuses on the input and farm level. Yet, based on the analysis of 280 digital services and products, we show that digital technologies are now being used along the entire food commodity chain. We argue that digital technologies in the third food regime serve on the one hand as a continuation of established information and communication technologies, thus deepening certain features of the existing food regime such as the retail sector’s control over global commodity chains. On the other hand, digital technologies also introduce new forms of control and value extraction based on the use of data and pave the way for large tech companies to take over market shares in the agri-food sector. Finally, we find that multinational agri-food companies are starting to take on the business models of leading digital tech companies, for instance by developing digital platforms throughout the agri-food system. We argue that this shows that the broader economic restructuring of neoliberal capitalism towards digital capitalism is also making its way into the agri-food system.

Bushmeat is a large but largely invisible contributor to the economies of west and central African countries. Yet the trade is currently unsustainable. Hunting is reducing wildlife populations, driving more vulnerable species to local and regional extinction, and threatening biodiversity. This paper uses a commodity chain approach to explore the bushmeat trade and to demonstrate why an interdisciplinary approach is required if the trade is to be sustainable in the future.

Avocados have become a global commodity, and environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the regions where avocados are grown have increased in tandem with production. In this article, we synthesize the current state of knowledge about the impacts of avocado production in Michoacán, México, the global center of avocado production. Environmental impacts on biodiversity, soil, and hydrological systems stem from deforestation and forest fragmentation that result from avocado expansion. The avocado industry has brought some economic benefits, namely increased employment and reductions in poverty and out-migration, but inequity in the region limits the positive socioeconomic impacts. We draw comparisons to other commodity studies and propose that lessons learned from such research could be utilized to make the avocado supply chain more sustainable. Ultimately, steps could be taken at all levels of the commodity chain to improve sustainability, including improved farming practices, policies protecting smallholders and local capital, and increased consumer awareness.

World-systems analysts argue that households take on a structural role within the capitalist system to mediate pressures exerted by the state and economic actors. Underpinning this view is the supply of low-paid and waged labor by household members in the process of social reproduction and the role of households as sites of commodity consumption. Here, I argue that the analytical choice to use the features of low-waged households renders a partial analysis of their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system. While acknowledging that households across the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) are neither spatially segregated (i.e., global North, global South) nor solely spaces of production or consumption, I suggest that households differ in their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system, subject to their incidence on the instantiation of hierarchical capitalist relations. First, “core” households differ from their peripheral counterparts via their reliance on financial assetization and capital accumulation in the core for (intergenerational) social reproduction. Second, in the process of social reproduction, core household excess commodity consumption generates metabolic differentials that fuel hierarchical relations of production and place core households in a more central location within a multi-sited capitalist system compared to peripheral ones. Third, the analysis of hierarchical capitalist relations and GCCs focuses on capital accumulation and the extraction of (women’s) household unpaid labor in the periphery. I argue that to more fully capture the extraction of unpaid labor across the GCC, household fluidity and heterogeneity and associated variation in intra-household divisions of labor must be analytically considered.

Far from being a self-enclosed system, capitalism is unable to create most of the skills, relations, and resources it needs to function. Capitalist accumulation depends on converting stuff created in varied ways, including photosynthesis and animal metabolism, into capitalist commodities. Capitalist commodities thus come into value by using-and obviating-non-capitalist social relations, human and non-human. How is this done? This article shows the importance of assessment practices in creating commodity value from non-capitalist value forms. Sorting mushrooms offers a startlingly clear example, because the mushrooms are basically unchanged except for sorting. Yet, similar practices are found in many commodity chains. Alienation cannot be taken for granted; it must be built into the commodity.

Contemporary globalization has been marked by significant shifts in the organization and governance of global industries. In the 1970s and 1980s, one such shift was characterized by the emergence of buyer-driven and producer-driven commodity chains. In the early 2000s, a more differentiated typology of governance structures was introduced, which focused on new types of coordination in global value chains (GVCs). Today the organization of the global economy is entering another phase, with transformations that are reshaping the governance structures of both GVCs and global capitalism at various levels: (1) the end of the Washington Consensus and the rise of contending centers of economic and political power; (2) a combination of geographic consolidation and value chain concentration in the global supply base, which, in some cases, is shifting bargaining power from lead firms in GVCs to large suppliers in developing economies; (3) new patterns of strategic coordination among value chain actors; (4) a shift in the end markets of many GVCs accelerated by the economic crisis of 2008-09, which is redefining regional geographies of investment and trade; and (5) a diffusion of the GVC approach to major international donor agencies, which is prompting a reformulation of established development paradigms.

As social movements co-evolve with changes in states and markets, it is crucial to examine how they make particular kinds of actors into focal points for the expression of grievances and the demand for rights. But researchers often bracket the question of why some kinds of organizations are more likely than others to become targets of social movement pressure. We theorize the \"social production of targets\" by social movements, rejecting a simple \"reflection\" model to focus on configurations of power and vulnerability that shape repertoires of contention. Empirically, we extend structural accounts of global commodity chains and cultural accounts of markets to analyze the production of targets in the case of the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s. Using a longitudinal, firm-level dataset and unique data on anti-sweatshop activism, we identify factors that attracted social movement pressure to particular companies. Firms' power and positions strongly shaped their likelihood of becoming targets of anti-sweatshop activism. But the likelihood of being a target also depended on the cultural organization of markets, which made some firms more \"shamable\" than others. Contrary to suggestions of an anti-globalization backlash, globalization on its own, and related predictions about protectionism, cannot explain the pattern of activism.

The dominant political-economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and global production networks offer powerful insights into the coordination and location of globally stretched supply chains, in particular from global South to North. By way of both conceptual and empirical challenge, this paper highlights flows of end-of-life goods from the global North towards the global South. This involves the disassembly and destruction of goods to recover secondary resources for further rounds of commodity production. Global recycling networks take things of rubbish value (often spent or end-of-life goods) and turn them back into resources in other places and production networks. They operate not through adding value, but by connecting different regimes of value. The paper does not set out a new conceptual framework, but asks what challenges the rekindling of value in used goods creates for global commodity chain analysis and what insights those approaches bring to looking at waste flows. The examples of used clothing and end-of-life merchant ships are mobilised to illustrate the dynamics of global recycling networks and to challenge prevailing commodity chain approaches in three key areas – supply logics and crosscutting networks, value and materiality, and inter-firm governance. We argue that resource recovery engenders highly complex and brokered forms of governance that relate to practices of valuing heterogeneous materials and that contrast markedly with the modes of coordination dominated by big capital typical of global production networks for consumer goods.

World-systems analysts argue that households take on a structural role within the capitalist system to mediate pressures exerted by the state and economic actors. Underpinning this view is the supply of low-paid and waged labor by household members in the process of social reproduction and the role of households as sites of commodity consumption. Here, I argue that the analytical choice to use the features of low-waged households renders a partial analysis of their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system. While acknowledging that households across the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) are neither spatially segregated (i.e., global North, global South) nor solely spaces of production or consumption, I suggest that households differ in their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system, subject to their incidence on the instantiation of hierarchical capitalist relations. First, “core” households differ from their peripheral counterparts via their reliance on financial assetization and capital accumulation in the core for (intergenerational) social reproduction. Second, in the process of social reproduction, core household excess commodity consumption generates metabolic differentials that fuel hierarchical relations of production and place core households in a more central location within a multi-sited capitalist system compared to peripheral ones. Third, the analysis of hierarchical capitalist relations and GCCs focuses on capital accumulation and the extraction of (women’s) household unpaid labor in the periphery. I argue that to more fully capture the extraction of unpaid labor across the GCC, household fluidity and heterogeneity and associated variation in intra-household divisions of labor must be analytically considered.