Over the past decades, the concept of global value chains (GVCs) has become an important analytical landmark within different strands of social sciences for making sense of the increasingly spatially and organizationally fragmented international system of production. The question arises what...

In the last decades in particular, national governments as well as development agencies and international organizations have increasingly turned to participation in global value chains (GVCs) as a development strategy. However, whether the positive development effects of integration are large...

This chapter focuses on the role of labor for social upgrading in the Global South and discusses different analytical approaches such as governance modes of global value chains, labor process theory, the power resources approach, transnational labor governance, and national systems of industrial...

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on power relations in global sourcing which goes beyond the prevalent focus on the dyadic business-to-business relation. The move through the various theories of power leads to my major claim which is that power dynamics in GVCs must be...

Although there is a broad range of feminist research on the role of gender relations in global production since the 1970s, gender has not systematically been included into (mainstream) theoretical concepts of Global Value Chains (GVCs) and Global Production Networks. The article reconstructs the...

For over 20 years, the Brazilian economy has faced enormous challenges as a result of neoliberal structural reforms, economic stagnation and external crises, particularly after the Latin American crisis of the late 1990s to early 2000s and after 2014. Deep economic structural changes and...

After the economic success of East Asian economies such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, many countries in the region copied the economic formula of developing export-oriented manufacturing industries, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), integrating into and moving up global...

Freedom of association and living wages are two fundamental components of social upgrading in global value chains. However, in the apparel sector, the power afforded to lead firms due to industry consolidation has resulted in a squeeze on suppliers and on workers that is reflected in terms of...

The COVID-19 crisis is unique in many respects, and as the IMF (World economic outlook April 2021. International Monetary Fund, p. 43, 2021a) puts it: "a crisis like no other." A global economic contraction occurred that was unprecedented in its speed and depth. Support packages were put...