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Following Arjun Apparudai’s eloquent formulation, a commodity could be considered as a “thing” which has a social life that circulates in different places (Appadurai 1986, 3). A commodity takes on different meanings as it comes across different places and people throughout its trajectory. The aim of a commodity chain analysis is to follow the social life of a commodity or commodities and examine how it invigorates multilayered meanings.

Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein argues: “Let us conceive of something we shall call, for want of a better conventional term, ‘commodity chains.’ What we mean by such chains is the following: take an ultimate consumable item and trace back the set of inputs that culminated in this item – the prior transformations, the raw materials, the transportation mechanism, the labor input into each of the material processes, the food inputs into the labor. This linked set of processes we call a commodity chain. If the ultimate consumable were, say, clothing, the chain would include the manufacture of the cloth, the yarn, etc., the cultivation of the cotton, as well as the reproduction of the labor forces involved in these productive activities.” (Wallerstein 1977, 128 cited in Bair 2009, 7-8)

Hopkins and Wallerstein’s conceptualization of commodity chain uses the mainstream political economy framework to investigate processes that take place within the territoriality of the capitalist world-system. Its social and spatial configuration is usually shaped by temporal shifts in the world economy. It examines how global division of labor evolves over time and how different activities in this division of labor receive unequal rewards in different spatial locations such as core, semi-periphery, and periphery (Bair 2009, 7-8).

Inspired by the world-system oriented commodity chain approach, Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewic develope a framework for studying global community chains or GCCs. The GCC analysis categorizes two main patterns of chains: producer-driven commodity chains and buyer-driven commodity chains. It explores how raw materials and other inputs transform into final products in different geographical locations. It analyzes how specific players in the chain govern other participants and distribute values in different institutional contexts. In this way, it connects different actors across different spaces and the world markets. It also allows “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” (Gereffi, Korzeniewicz, and Korzeniewicz 1994, 2 cited in Bair 2009, 9-10).

The GCC literature has been criticized for several reasons. For example, it retains the world-system’s tradition of dividing the world into core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries. It portrays a linear picture of how low skill and raw material based commodities are produced in peripheral regions and then retailed and consumed in the capital-intensive core. It examines processes through which peripheral economies become sites of low wage labor, export-led production, debt-alleviation-oriented development, and structural adjustment policies and does not shed any light on the core or semi-periphery. It exclusively focuses the buyer-driven approach, prioritizes macro-scale political economic factors, and lacks attention towards local specificities. In many cases, it assumes a reductionist character, over-emphasizes economic adversities at the site of production, and ignores power relations in retail and consumption sites (Hughes and Reimer 2004, 2-3). Parvati Raghuram (2004) advances four more critiques of GCC. First, GCC assumes that large-scale corporate producers exert total control over patterns of mass consumption. It does not analyze in what ways consumers could also make agential choices about consumption. Second, GCC narratives are mostly centered on transnational corporations (TNCs). It does not examine roles of small-scale producers in the commodity chain. Third, GCC considers producers and consumers as two mutually exclusive disconnected groups. It does not explore producers’ participation or influence in consumption and consumers’ participation or influence in production. Fourth, GCC analyzes Third World experiences only in terms of the new international division of labor. Consumers in the Third World are left unaddressed (Raghuram 2004, 121-122).

By the end of 1990s, some scholars preferred using the global value chain or GVC analysis instead of a commodity chain approach. According to them, GVC avoids the predicament of using the term “commodity” that very limitedly refers to low-value added primary products in the GCC literature. It overcomes the restricting approach of identifying either a buyer-driven approach or a producer-driven approach. It also offers a common typology for including researches that studied international production networks without using the GCC analysis. Nevertheless, Bair notes that literatures on the world-system tradition, the GCC framework, and the GVC analysis often overlaps. Many researchers have incorporated more than one of these three approaches in their research. They have chosen specific typology based on theoretical and analytical demands of their research arena (Bair 2009, 11-14).

Bair argues that the world-system theory does not focus only on the progressive movement of a commodity through its sequential phases of production, circulation, and consumption. Instead of just looking “forward,” the world-system analysis looks outward from a node and inquires which structures and processes create the product and relationships in that specific node. In this way, the world-system theory offers the scope to conceptualize the commodity chain as a web instead of a chain (Bair 2009, 15). The analytical vocabulary of “web”, “circuit”, or “network” overcomes the linear nature of the commodity chain. Developing a network based approach does not focus only on beginning and end points of the trajectory of the commodity. It considers connections and disjunctures between production, circulation, and consumption of a commodity as complex, interdependent, and multi-stranded webs. It ascribes contextual meanings to times, places, and mechanisms that shape experiences of different associated actors such as states, firms, workers, organizations, and consumer groups (Hughes and Reimer 2004, 3-5). Barrett et al., for example, use a commodity network frame instead of a chain based model to review contemporary campaigns for ethical trade led by the fashion industry, small-scale farmers, and environmental activists. They argue that commodity network analysis is well-equipped to study campaigns and movements because it considers consumer coalitions, unions, non-profit organizations, and media as active agents along with TNCs (Barrett, Browne, and Ilbery 2004, 19-38).

A fixed, unidirectional, and vertical chain-based model only focuses on flows of commodities and processes along the chain. It ignores the role of common elements that signify relationships in each node of the commodity chain. For example, “horizontal” dimensions such as place and gender rarely get attention in a commodity chain analysis (Bair 2009, 17). That is why Priti Ramamurthy describes the mainstream commodity chain analysis as the “realist” commodity chain analysis. According to Ramamurthy, the realist commodity chain analysis conceptualizes a unidirectional flow of investments from the First World to the Third World. It mostly describes how TNCs accumulate profits by overcoming protective national barriers, lowering labor costs, and increasing flexibility of capital movement. It does not account for women’s experience in the new global division of labor. It fails to understand how women in export-oriented industries and households absorb burdens of neoliberal structural adjustment policies and restructuring. Ramamurthy proposes a feminist commodity chain analysis as a critique of the realist commodity chain approach. The feminist commodity chain analysis examines materially and culturally constructed power relations in each node of the commodity chain. It suggests interpretive methodologies to examine how commodities shape multi-sited production and consumption relations that are vital constituents of globalizing forces. It challenges master narratives of globalization by focusing on women’s body, labor, and gender ideologies. The feminist commodity chain analysis uses “perplexity” as a conceptual platform, which refers to experiential paradoxes that actors of globalization face in their everyday lives. Ramamurthy defines perplexity as “the meeting point where multiple ideologies that constitute the subject – cultural practices, temporalities, and place – conjoin and diverge.” A critical eye on perplexed subjects establishes them not simply as “speaking subjects” but as “subjects-in-contradiction.” Perplexed subjects are involved in asymmetric and overlapping power relations. They are neither passive followers nor active resisters of globalization (Ramamurthy 2003, 524-550).

Raghuram argues that the mainstream GCC literature including many feminist interventions are often influenced by the concept of new international division of labor. They demonstrate the tendency of investigating gendered labor relations in the site of production (read: the Third World) and gendered consumption relations in the site of consumption (read: the First World) in the commodity chain. They ascribe the role of workers primarily on the “Third World women” and conceptualize the “First World women” (mostly white women) mostly as consumers (Raghuram 2004, 124-125). It is, therefore, important to problematize the reductionist narrative of mainstream as well as many feminist interventions in the commodity chain literature. New research interventions could be grounded on an understanding of new global division of labor instead of new international division of labor. The new global division of labor framework provides conceptual tools for tracing feminized labor across different nodes of the commodity chain. It offers the scope to inquire how workers, consumers, governments, transnational corporations, financial institutions, and activist organizations complicate typical roles ascribed to the First World and Third World women and how they negotiate complex hierarchies of gender, race, and class.

References:

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3-63. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bair, Jennifer. 2009. "Global Commodity Chains: Genealogy and Review." In Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research, edited by Jennifer Bair, 1-34. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Barrett, Hazel, Angela Browne, and Brian Ilbery. 2004. "From Farm to Supermarket: The Trade in Fresh Horticultural Produce from Sub-Saharan Africa to the United Kingdom." In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by Alex Hughes and Suzzane Reimer, 19-38. New York and London: Routledge.

Coe, Neil M. 2011. "Unpacking Globalization: Changing Geographies of the Global Economy." In The SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography, edited by Andrew Leyshon, Roger Lee, Linda McDowell, and Peter Sunley, 89-101. UK: SAGE.

Fouberg, Erin H., Alexander B. Murphy, and H. J. de Blij. 2009. Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture. USA: John Wiley & Sons. Hughes, Alex and Suzzane Reimer. 2004. "Introduction." In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by Alex Hughes and Suzzane Reimer, 1-16. New York and London: Routledge.

Raghuram, Parvati. 2004. "Initiating the Commodity Chain: South Asian Women and Fashion in the Diaspora." In Geographies of Commodity Chains, edited by Alex Hughes and Suzzane Reimer, 120-136. New York and London: Routledge.

Rajan, Gita and Jigna Desai. 2013. "Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia." In Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia, edited by Gita Rajan and Jigna Desai, 1-12. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Ramamurthy, Priti. 2003. "Material Consumer, Fabricating Subjects: Perplexity, Global Connectivity Discourses, and Transnational Feminist Research." Cultural Anthropology 18 (4): 524-550.