New International Division Of Labor

Spatial Division of Labor

A. Smith , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

New Spatial Divisions of Labor: Value Chains, Article Bondage, and Global Production Networks

These conceptualizations of dynamic and changing spatial divisions of labor – through the new international division of labor – have been developed further over the terminal x years or then, specifically with regard to debates over global article chains, global production networks, and networked forms of value production. The further development of spatial divisions of labor into new conceptual frameworks involving article chains and production networks has been very profitable. In particular, these new frameworks accept focused on identifying the organizational forces leading to item changes in spatial divisions of labor. This has enabled a focus on what has been chosen the governance of global product. Gereffi's focus on global commodity chains, for example, has stressed the importance of understanding the role of atomic number 82 agents in the global organization of production. In item, Gereffi emphasizes the distinctive roles of buyer-driven and producer-driven commodity chains (Tabular array two). Producer-driven chains involve capital-intensive and engineering science-intensive industries, unremarkably coordinated past large multinational enterprises and are characteristic of sectors such as automobile, aircraft, and reckoner manufacturing. Buyer-driven chains, which accept received much more attention in the research literature, are organized in a less hierarchical manner, in which big retailers and buying organizations establish geographically distributed contracting networks with a large number of manufacturing operations, sometimes mediated past middlemen organizations, such as merchandise companies. Such bondage are typically establish in sectors such equally vesture and footwear, where labor-intensive operations are more important. These pb firms pattern and market the product but unremarkably do non manufacture goods. Unlike producer-driven chains, where profits come up from economies of scale, high book production, and technological innovation, buyer-driven chains combine higher-value blueprint, sales, marketing, and financial services in the activities of retailers allowing them to act as strategic brokers in geographically distributed networks of overseas factories and traders. These factories are linked to the principal markets for consumption past the heir-apparent-driven agents in the chain, who are thereby able to accumulate profits from the control of distributional and retail networks, brands and their epitome, and college-level design and control functions in these global spatial divisions of labor.

Tabular array two. Characteristics of producer- and buyer-driven commodity bondage

	Course of economical governance
	Producer-driven	Heir-apparent-driven
Decision-making type of capital	Commercial	Industrial
Capital/engineering science intensity	Loftier	Low
Labor characteristics in production	Skilled/high wage	Unskilled/depression wage
Controlling house	Manufacturer	Retailer
Product integration	Vertical/bureaucratic	Horizontal/networked
Command	Internalized/hierarchical	Externalized/market
Contracting/outsourcing	Moderate and increasing	Loftier
Suppliers provide	Intermediate goods	Finished goods
Examples	Automobiles, computers, shipping, electrical machinery	Vesture, footwear, toys, consumer electronics

Adjusted from Kessler and Appelbaum (1998).

More recently, this framework has been extended in several directions to focus on value chains rather than commodity bondage (through Gereffi's collaborative initiatives with John Humphreys at the Institute of Evolution Studies and Tim Sturgeon at MIT), on global product networks (through the Academy of Manchester-based Global Production Networks project), and on networks of value and new spatial divisions of labor (through collaborative enquiry on regional development in the enlarged European Union). Each of these approaches has sought to build upon the original global commodity chains framework just to extend it in two main ways to understand new spatial divisions of labor. First, these new frameworks have sought to move abroad from a focus on the commodity to the social relations and organisation of product and value creation, distribution and appropriation in spatial divisions of labor. This has the potential to render more fully to Massey's original framework emphasizing that all forms of product are embedded in social relations and that backer commodity production processes and the divisions of labor they create are about the (uneven) distribution and evolution of control of surplus value and profit in the economy. Second, a shift has occurred away from a more linear conceptualization of chains, in which commodities pass through unlike links in a unidirectional chain, to 1 emphasizing the circuitous system of networks across space. These product or value networks are the lines through which value is created and divisions of labor established in the global economy.

More recently, accent has been placed on understanding how firms in particular places in an international spatial division of labor tin try to reposition themselves and to upgrade activeness to capture college levels of value added and profit. This process of upgrading has involved the capturing of certain types of activity and some of the command and control functions in the global economic system from global buyers. An illustrative example is again provided from the wearable industry in which some assembly firms in lower-cost production locations such as Mexico, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Due east-Central Europe have been taking on the part of what is called full-packet production. Buyers and retailers in core markets have increasingly relinquished these activities and have been seeking suppliers who can purchase fabric and trim inputs (moving abroad from outward processing type arrangements), organize production networks to schedules determined by buyers, and provide packed, hung, bar coded and labeled clothing direct to warehouses and stores in core markets. This process of upgrading enables some firms to reposition themselves in global spatial divisions of labor, but recreates new divisions through potentially outsourcing production to new firms in new locations. Questions accept also been raised well-nigh the extent to which business firm-level upgrading translates into comeback in the weather condition of work for employees and into wider regional-level processes of economical upgrading and value capture.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104002285

Services, Professional person

A. James , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Futurity Research Directions

Research on the socioeconomic geographies of professional person services continues to develop a distinctive contribution to our understanding of emerging global service networks and new international divisions of labor, as well as the new forms of piece of work and employment which narrate cognition-intensive firms in the new economy more by and large. In that location are a number of directions in which futurity research on this sector might usefully develop, non least because professional services are widely seen as a 'flagship' new economic system sector, where work and employment practices are developed kickoff earlier diffusing out to other industrial sectors.

Starting time, in light of persistent structures of inequality inside professional person service firms which militate against female and ethnic minority workers progressing every bit quickly through employment hierarchies as their white male person colleagues, future inquiry should continue to dereify so-chosen 'glass ceilings' of constraint by grounding them in everyday concrete workplace interactions, social processes, and their associated causal agents – an attribution of responsibleness upon which policy actors might then deed. Moreover, by demonstrating empirically the means in which these same worker inequalities based on gender and ethnicity themselves constrain corporate innovative performance, future studies might also develop arguments for workforce diversity couched in the linguistic communication of economic competitiveness that firms (and governments) specially appreciate and understand.

Second, building on previous case studies in the legal services and advertising sectors, there exists considerable scope for exploring the role of local informal and formal institutional context in shaping the internationalization strategies of other types of professional person service firms. In so doing, geographers might offer increased empirical and conceptual insights into (overcoming) the spatial limits to cognition and learning which are probable to underpin divergent development trajectories in the emerging 'new economy'.

Finally, future piece of work might as well usefully explore the emergent operations of professional service firms outside of the USA, Western Europe and South East asia, specially in non-English speaking countries – or in other words, exterior of economical geography'due south domain of empirical inquiry as traditionally demarcated vis-à-vis development studies. In this way, new work might contribute to the nascent 'postcolonial economic geographies' research calendar which, while conceptually heady, nevertheless continues to endure from a rather narrow empirical prove base.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/commodity/pii/B9780080449104002169

World-System

K. Terlouw , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Stagnation and Consolidation

After its emergence in the long sixteenth century (±1450–1650), our world-system stagnated. Production and trade macerated. Although regional self-sufficiency increased and the international division of labor contracted, the capitalist world-economy did not disappear. The many wars in this menstruum (±1600–1750) strengthened the cadre states and institutionalized the interstate system of competing sovereign states. This consolidated the modern earth-system and created the conditions for a renewed expansion in the side by side period, for case, by integrating their territories into national markets (Figure 2).

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/commodity/pii/B9780080449104008129

Industrial Restructuring

R. Hudson , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Eco-Restructuring

In recent years, there has been growing recognition that industrial production is predicated upon processes of material transformation that have unavoidable impacts on nature and the natural surround. As concerns with the ecological impacts of industrial production, further heightened by the emergence of Prc and India as major centers of industrial product in a further twist to the evolving international sectionalization of labor, take intensified, there has been a growing interest in the concept of eco-restructuring. Eco-restructuring involves seeking to motion capitalist economies onto more than ecologically and environmentally sustainable trajectories and every bit such has stiff normative and moral connotations. Proponents of this viewpoint fence that via a judicious combination of innovations in product, process, and transport technologies, steered by appropriate state policies, the environmental footprint of industrial production, and in detail the impacts of enhanced carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, can be lessened and kept within sustainable boundaries. Information technology is recognized that this will necessarily involve meaning changes in lifestyle and cultural shifts in attitudes towards production, mobility, and consumption and not but changes in hard technologies. In this sense, this is a motion forrard from the technological optimism of earlier times only it remains to be seen whether industrial capitalism can be successfully eco-restructured to prevent global ecology ending.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104001772

World/Global Cities

B. Derudder , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Groundwork

The thought of a world economy articulated through certain cities is longstanding, simply the specific suggestion of a set of cities having a strategic function in coordinating and controlling the globe'south economic system is relatively new. Contemporary inquiry on globe/global cities can be traced back to a scattering of authors writing in the 1970s and 1980s, whereby – in spite of some earlier contributions – its theoretical raw materials are regularly traced dorsum to John Friedmann's 'World city hypothesis'. In this article, the author identifies world cities every bit centers that control and articulate the 'new international partitioning of labor' created by multinational corporations. This unambiguous conceptual connection between 'earth urban center formation' and the and so much-debated emergence of a 'new international division of labor' already points to what would get a major, recurring characteristic of the world/global cities literature, that is, the fact that it has always been very quick in absorbing new theories, methodologies, and intellectual frameworks developed in other literatures. Major examples include the intrusion of vigorous and wide-ranging debates, such as those on the potential of post-structuralist thinking and on the role and relevance of national states in a global era. Taken together, this has led to a situation in which the world/global cities research has turned into a laboratory for the social sciences every bit a whole, whereby major figures in homo geography have fabricated meaning contributions.

Research on world/global cities is founded on ii cardinal observations. Offset, the worldwide distribution of economic activeness necessitates strategic command functions that are found in a limited number of locations: globalization in its various guises has led to increased geographical complexity, which calls for some command points to ensure the polish functioning of the global system. In other words, world/global cities contain a asymmetric quantity of strategic agents in the global arrangement (e.chiliad., headquarters of multinational corporations and international institutions, and specialized and internationalized business firms), and this functional concentration mirrors the deepening of processes of global integration and interdependence.

2nd, the exercise of this strategic control is accomplished through the chapters of these world/global city agents to network beyond space. From the 1970s onward, two distinct advanced technologies, computers and communications, combined to create a new enabling infrastructure for global organization. As it became more pervasive and sophisticated, this global infrastructure implied that spatial system became increasingly conceptualized through networks (in which interaction is divers past simultaneity) to the detriment of territoriality (in which interaction is defined past proximity). Envisaging world/global cities in the context of a 'network society' specially gained momentum in the 1990s, when influential authors similar Manuel Castells asserted that globalization processes are basically all about transnational processes operating through numerous networks.

Taken together, it is clear that the upsurge of interest in world/global cities has been instrumental in rooting urban geography in the debates that have dominated the social sciences from the 1980s onward. A straightforward interpretation of the remarkable success of this research field, therefore, is that it directly confronts the commonplace observation that contemporary urban life cannot be properly understood without making some reference to 'globalization' and the coming into beingness of a 'network society' (Figure 2). When combining both buzzwords, it tin can be noted that world/global cities are normally conceived within the framework of a global network of cities, which provides geographers with an culling spatial skeleton for mapping and understanding contemporary globalization.

Read full chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104011123

Manufacture, Historical Geographies of

R. Lewis , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

The Spatial Division of Labor and the Historical Geographies of Industry

Ane of the virtually dramatic effects of the long-term processes of uneven development and upper-case letter accumulation has been to dissever the earth into quite distinct parts, to forge a distinctive yet shifting spatial segmentation of labor. Regardless of the labels given to this partition, core–periphery, developed–underdeveloped, or First Third–Third World, the main effect of capitalist industrialization has been to geographically separate the global economy by power and profits. This has been a long fourth dimension in the making. The manufacturing dominance of non-European countries more than 250 years ago has been undermined. In the eighteenth century, India and Red china accounted for 57% of the world'south manufacturing output (Table one). The dual processes of mod industrial manufacturing and European empire building, all the same, destroyed the handicraft grapheme of the early leaders and led to the supremacy of a handful of industrial backer countries in Europe and Due north America. By 1913 more than 60% of all manufacturing output was concentrated in 3 countries: the United States, Germany, and the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland.

Tabular array one. Manufacturing output of selected countries, 1750–1913

Country	%
	1750	1830	1880	1913
People's republic of china	32.8	29.viii	12.five	3.6
India	24.5	17.6	two.8	1.4
France	iv.0	5.2	vii.eight	6.ane
Japan	three.viii	two.8	2.4	2.7
Deutschland	ii.9	3.5	viii.v	14.viii
United kingdom	ane.9	ix.five	22.ix	13.6
The states	0.1	ii.four	xiv.7	32.0

Note: Output consists of both handicraft and industrial manufacturing.

Source: Tomlinson, B. (1999). Economics: The periphery. In Porter A. (ed.) The Oxford history of the British Empire, volume Iii: The nineteenth century, p 69. Oxford: Oxford Academy Press.

At the same time, the underdeveloped earth has been turned into a huge reservoir of raw materials for the adult earth'due south factories. While rubber from Malaysia, cotton from India, fe ore from Brazil, and coffee from Republic of kenya accept fed the industrial automobile of the adult countries, fiddling processing has been done in the underdeveloped world. This has several serious consequences. Kickoff, most of the value-added component of the final product has gone to North American and European manufacturers. Second, the economies of the underdeveloped world are highly unstable because of their reliance on primary products and declining terms of trade which favor the First World. Third, the fluctuating needs of developed countries and the ability of firms to shift capital from place to place in search of always more than meliorate quality and cheaper supplies of raw materials have trapped periphery countries in a vicious cycle of underdevelopment.

Critical to the shifting international partition of labor, both in the past and in the nowadays, have been interfirm and intrafirm backward and forward linkages operating across national boundaries. From the earliest days, firms, by deploying their ain agents or long-distance merchants, have traded manufacturing inputs. Indeed, to a big extent, Western dominance of global industry over the past 300 years has relied upon the ability to command the commodity chain, from admission to raw materials to the distribution and marketing of finished products. Earlier the end of the nineteenth century, relatively unintegrated industrial firms relied on a wide set of intermediaries to coordinate the flow of manufacturing inputs and outputs. With the merger movements starting at the end of the nineteenth century and the ascension of the large vertically integrated corporation an increasing share of trade between firms became internal to the firm. A complex system of ownership and intracorporate interaction developed. In the early twentieth century, for example, large corporations, such as United states Steel controlled raw textile sites (fe ore mines), big integrated steel mills, finishing steel works, transportation (railroads and shipping firms), and wholesalers, were integrated through board membership with financial houses and banks.

Large transnational corporations accept the ability to drastically reshape national, regional, and local industrial landscapes. The burgeoning economic power of corporations in eighteenth-century Britain, nineteenth-century United States, and twentieth-century Japan has been played out in many other countries. American large-calibration, direct investment since the 1880s, for example, has led to the development of a branch establish economic system in Canada. Seeking the markets of Canada and the British Empire (through Canada'southward preferential merchandise agreements), plentiful raw textile supplies, and greater profits, American capitalists began venturing into the manufacturing sector of Fundamental Canada and the timber and mineral resources of the hinterland in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This has continued ever since, resulting in limited industrial development, the flow of profits out of Canada, and massive United states of america business and political influence in Canadian life.

The state has been critical to the formation and unfolding of uneven development and the international division of labor. Before World War I, when private entrepreneurs operating through the market place were the ascendant agents of industrial change, the state's straight role in industrial development was minimal. In Neat Britain and many other European countries, however, the developing industrial country did promote and orchestrate economical activities. Diverse levels of government (from the national to the local) intervened in a variety of ways. Although there were few explicit attempts to build a state-led industrial policy before Globe War I, governments, through the redistribution of income, the development on nonindustrial sectors, and support for economic and social institutions, underpinned the formation of a modern industrial society. In the last tertiary of the nineteenth century in emerging industrial nations, such as Japan, Canada, the The states, and Russia, the state was a more important agent of alter and, under the guise of national development, a major vehicle for capital accumulation.

The state has become more than involved in supporting, coordinating, and defending industrialization over the past 100 years. Information technology has been involved in drawing upwardly industrial policy by, among other things, facilitating industrial access to credit, establishing intranational and international trading pacts, and stoking consumer markets. The country has become more than heavily involved in financing and building necessary infrastructures, from nineteenth-century Canadian railroads to twentieth-century Chinese ports. The contemporary land has also been extremely active in establishing the ideological, legal, and technological framework of the capitalist and land-socialist systems. Finally, the state has formulated and implemented militaristic and territorial expansion in order to drive national economic expansionism. From the British intrusions into its colonies before 1800 to economical colonization past the United States and Nihon's territorial ambitions in Asia in more recent times, the state has shaped international, regional, and local divisions of labor.

The recent growth of newly industrializing countries has had footling impact on the international division of labor: profits keep to be siphoned off past head offices in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Tokyo; technological innovation remains in the older developed world; majuscule shifts from place to place seeking the best returns; and country policies reinforce existing practices of capital letter aggregating that favor the developed world. This is evident in the case of the maquiladoras hugging the southern side of the US–Mexican border. Brought in after the endmost of the Bracero (guest worker) program in 1965, the purpose of the maquiladora program was to attract foreign assembly plants to Mexico. Starting off quite slowly, the pace of growth quickened after 1980, and by 2000 more than than 3500 firms employed 1.3 million workers. Most plants are owned past developed world firms (such as Volkswagen at Puebla and Toyota at Tijuana) which have come seeking low wages, poor environmental regulations, high profits, and a pliable national state. The result is the maintenance of the developed–underdeveloped split.

Read total affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104003709

Regional Development Models

M. Dunford , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Economic Geography Models

Explaining regional development implies explaining the territorial division of labor (who does what, where, and when, what rewards they receive and in what relationships they stand to other people and economic activities in other places) and the constantly evolving resource endowments on which it depends.

In the past, geographical analyses of the territorial division of labor tended to concentrate on abstruse models of economic landscapes. Examples include the work of von Thünen, Weber, Hotelling, Christaller, and Lösch. In the 1970s, the emphasis was placed by Hymer, Lipietz, and Massey on conceptually informed classifications of the functional roles of regional economies in wider national and international divisions of labor. In the 1980s and 1990s, a diverse array of conceptual models were advanced to characterize geographical systems of product, explicate their structure, and account for their relative economical operation. Spatial categories examined included industrial districts; areas of specialized product, local productive systems, and system areas; localized industrial systems; clusters; new industrial spaces; technopoles and science parks that comprise innovative enterprises, research centers, and universities; worlds of product; milieux innovateurs; regional innovation systems; and learning regions. To explain these spatial structures, and to explicate their reciprocal impact on development, three main groups of causal mechanisms are examined: (1) resource endowments; (2) industrial organization, industrial strategies, externalities, and transaction costs; and (three) innovation, systems of innovation, knowledge, private and collective learning, and creativity. Equally a result, however, of interpretations of ideas associated with theories of regulation, institutional economic science, or evolutionary folklore, these mechanisms are seen equally operating in a series of specific historical contexts and of comprising a range of historical development models.

Some other important recent evolution is the emergence of the new geographical economic science which seeks to explain the emergence of economic landscapes (characterized by spatial agglomeration, regional specialization, and core–periphery structures) and the regional resource endowments that were taken as the starting indicate for many earlier models. To this end, models are developed to examine the location of profit-maximizing firms often in a world of increasing returns and imperfect competition, drawing on analyses of the impacts of increasing returns, forward- and backward-linkages, external economies, endogenous growth, product differentiation, external diseconomies, etc., to generate imaginary economical landscapes (Figure 5).

Read total chapter

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/commodity/pii/B9780080449104008683

Local Development

M. Garofoli , in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Novelties

The emergence of new industrial regions and their amend economical performances modified the previous hierarchy among regions, both at the international and national levels. The economic crunch and the de-industrialization of some of the get-go comers – industrial and well-adult regions – were coupled with the rise of new regions within the international segmentation of labor and trade relationships.

This novelty was neither the consequence of majuscule mobility from developed regions nor the replication of previous models of product organizations. In other words, this procedure was not the consequence of simplistic regional reorganization due to market place forces which reacted to unlike relative prices. On the contrary, it unsaid both the role of social and cultural variables and new forms of social regulation. The new industrial regions are usually the consequence of a dialectic process between market opportunities, mobilization of existing (ofttimes unused or badly used) resources, knowledge and learning, and new forms of product arrangement.

The local development approach recognizes, in fact, both the opportunity for dissimilar paths of development (due east.chiliad., based on small firms and systems of small firms, like industrial districts) and the office of local actors in managing the use of their resource, through the introduction of specific strategies.

This leads to a plurality of local models of development (i.eastward., opportunity for different strategies of local and regional development and for unlike economical policies using a wide set up of tools) and allows to have into account the subjectivity of the local actors (i.e., individuals, firms, collective private organizations, intermediate institutions, public institutions, and the local and regional state) in their beliefs and controlling process in relation to investments and long-term interventions.

Local evolution cases were normally induced through spontaneous organization (this specifically implies 'bottom-upward' processes) but, at the same fourth dimension, often benefited from the capability of introducing specific forms of social regulation and models of economic coordination.

The calibration of local development – both for the assay and for the construction of local strategies – could vary in consideration of different economic and social features (including density of population) and historical background of different localities. Practically, the definition of scale depends on the internal homogeneity and identity – from an economic, social, and cultural perspective – and external differentiation, in comparing with external areas. It depends, then, not just on structural characteristics (which could be measured with statistical indicators) just likewise on subjective perceptions of local actors. The definitions of local strategies are, in fact, very often decided on a voluntary basis which includes even the geographical definition of locality boundaries. Empirically, local development analyses and strategies refer to an intermediate scale between the municipal level and the administrative regional level. When the bang-up urban areas are excluded, local development strategies are introduced in areas with a population range betwixt 30 000 and 200 000 people.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scientific discipline/article/pii/B9780080449104008518

Feminism and Work

J. Pollard , in International Encyclopedia of Human being Geography, 2009

Feminist Geographies of Work

This department focuses on feminist readings of work that embody a geographical imagination, spanning from the body to the world. Geographers have actively engaged with feminist scholarship and sought to understand how the binary, and hierarchical, male/female has been written through the social product of space. The section includes reference to theoretically informed work which explores local and international labor markets and the gendered structure of globalization.

Gendered Local Labor Markets

Many economical and sociological analyses of women's occupational segregation paid picayune attention to the spatialities of gendered behaviors and divisions of labor. Some of the early geographic research on gender divisions thus focused on how individuals' daily fourth dimension–space paths are shaped by domestic responsibilities and admission to physical infrastructure, like transport, schools, and workplaces that shape and constrain mobility. Studies thus focused on, for case, commuting patterns and whether different groups of women undertake shorter or longer commutes than their partners. Literatures in geography, urban studies, and planning as well analyzed the rising of suburbanization and the changing spatial separation of 'home' and (paid) 'work'.

In addition to exploring the spatialities of daily life that shape labor markets, geographers have as well fatigued attention to the uneven spatial distribution of different sectors and occupations. Given the pronounced occupational segregation discussed to a higher place, the geographies of men and women'south participation are shaped, differentially, past the growth and decline of particular types of piece of work. Thus, Susan Hanson, Geraldine Pratt, Doreen Massey, and others have examined the gendered implications of economic modify, especially manufacturing decline and the growth of service sectors and occupations, in industrial areas characterized by unionized, male-dominated jobs. Returning to the discussion nearly the social construction of skill, labor process theorists like Harry Braverman have argued that as piece of work is deskilled past employers, women would be employed as the new 'unskilled' laborers, replacing men. Extending some of the Marxian accounts of women's piece of work discussed earlier, feminist geographers argued that employers seeking to make employ of divisions between workers to reduce their costs may thus be attracted to regions where there is a plentiful supply of cheap 'light-green', female (and indeed kid) labor and that these workers constitute a reserve army of labor. Similarly on an international scale, literatures on the new international partition of labor in the 1980s drew attention to the feminization of poorly paid manufacturing piece of work as industrialized economies in the north started to relocate labor-intensive manufacturing work, like electronics assembly and garment product, to lower wage economies in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world.

Gendered Globalization

Another of import product of a geographical feminist imagination has been date with critical evolution studies to explore the experiences of women in various social and geographical contexts and, specifically, the experiences of women across the (for the most part) privileged confines of Northward America, Australia, and Western Europe. This appointment entails an empirical shift in that it brings into focus the often neglected places and subjects of economical geography. More than this, however, it entails an analytical shift away from western-centered knowledges that privilege capitalism, course, and globalization and toward grounded analyses of the experiences of marginalized groups and spaces that opens up possibilities for dissimilar means of theorizing globalization. The research on changing international divisions of labor described thus, for example, generated vigorous contend around two areas. Offset, in that location were concerns that stereotypes surrounding women's employment – that women represented a nimble fingered, nonunionized and, relatively docile, labor force to be exploited by capitalists – once more reared their head, with little recognition of women's agency and their capacities and strategies for resistance. Lesley Salzinger, for example, has undertaken ethnographies of work that reveal the embodied, performative context-dependent product of gender identities in four macquiladoras in Chihuahua, Mexico. Salzinger demonstrates the variability and flexibility of gender identities and argues that women's productivity and docility did not predate the arrival of transnational firms in Mexico, but was instead produced by firms that moved to the region. 2d, withal, women's growing visibility in factory product in industrializing economies likewise fueled contend virtually the qualities of jobs being created and whether women's labor forcefulness participation improved or worsened the quality of life for these women. Many analyses of women's growing date with transnational nature of capitalist production – which is often in a geopolitical context of high levels of indebtedness and neoliberal structural aligning policies imposed by western lending institutions-argue that women's participation in low-paid manufacturing jobs strains household dynamics and farther increases women'due south workloads. These analyses drew attention to the necessity of recognizing and exploring the relationship between household and workplace, between production and reproduction, the formal and the informal and, in essence, questioning the supposed dominance of capitalist forms of production. An of import achievement of feminists' research is a broadening of analysis to admit that 'the economic' takes place non only in the factory, but also in the domicile, the street, and elsewhere.

More recent feminist literatures on globalization explore issues of marginalization, displacement, and struggle through analyses of how globalization is producing new transnational movements of women and children, particularly from industrializing countries in the due south. Saskia Sassen has explored the links between the deteriorating economic position of different industrializing economies and the growth of what she terms 'counter geographies', women's growing interest in culling economies of survival based on prostitution, illegal trafficking, migration, and remittances. International networks now organize the transnational movements of women who are pushed, lured, or coerced into formal and breezy work as maids, nurses, mail-order brides, sex workers, and so forth. Joni Seager estimates that nigh 500 000 women and children are trafficked into Western Europe each year, many from Mainland china, other parts of Southeast Asia, and parts of East and Primal Europe where unemployment and debt take pushed households into poverty and fueled the growth of trafficking as a profitable industry. While poorer regions typically go source regions for trafficking, ascent dispensable income in other regions fuels demand for these women and children. Research on trafficking, prostitution, and the global sex merchandise and on women's mobilities as migrants and refugees thus reveals how these complex counter geographies are intrinsic to the economical, cultural, and political connections and flows which link work, economic restructuring, and livelihoods in the n and south.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://world wide web.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080449104001589

Transnational Corporations in Developing Countries

C. Berndt , in International Encyclopedia of Man Geography, 2009

TNCs and the Global South

In his contribution to a volume edited past Jagdish Bhagwati in the early 1970s, Stephen Hymer (1972) asked about the part of the MNC at the cease of the twentieth century. Arguing that it represented "an important step forward over previous methods of organizing international substitution" by bringing about an ever more extensive and productive international sectionalization of labor, he predicted the continuing expansion of the multinational form of industrial organisation as a primal chemical element of global capitalism.

Indeed, corporate cross-border activities have increased dramatically. The worldwide inward stock of cross-border FDI, for case, has risen 18-fold from 561 billion USD in 1980 to 10 129 billion USD in 2005 (Source: UNCTAD 2006). Of course, the global distribution of FDI has always been a highly uneven affair. Over the 15-yr period 1990–2005, developed countries attracted about 70% of FDI inflows, developing countries and transition economies accounting for 28% and 2%, respectively. What is more, if one breaks the data downward to 5-year intervals the overall share of and then-chosen developing countries has fallen, from xxx.9% (1990–94) to 25.7% (2000–04; see Table 1 and Figure 1). And the cartography of global FDI flows gets even more unbalanced in the latter group, if the asymmetric share of countries such as China, Mexico, or Brazil and the near negligible flow to African countries are taken into account (Effigy 2). These disparities are slightly outset past the growing role of southern TNCs and FDI originating in the Global South, but the noticeable growth of southern global players such as Lenovo or Tata in contempo years does not change the overall film.

Tabular array 1. Global FDI inward flows according to geographical regions, 1990–2005

	1990–2005		1990–1994		1995–1999		2000–2004
	Billion USD	%	Billion USD	%	Billion USD	%	Billion USD	%
Developed economies	633 376 720	69.72	68 733 038	68.37	211 987 762	69.86	297 063 217	71.96
Developing economies	256 126 762	28.19	31012086	thirty.85	87020879	28.68	106 026 772	25.68
Economies in transition	18 914 498	2.08	786 042	0.78	4 433 444	1.46	9 727 076	ii.36
Total	908 417 980	100	100 531 166	100	303 442 085	100	412 817 066	100

Source: UNCTAD, 2006.

There has always been considerable controversy about the precise office of FDI from the perspective of the Global South. The underlying arguments do not seem to have changed much during the terminal 50 years or and then. In a recent special issue of World Economy, Jagdish Bhagwati (2007) writes a robust defense against what he sees as oversimplified criticism. On the one mitt, he refutes claims of tax contest and a 'race to the lesser', downplays the power of large TNCs in smaller countries, comments positively on the role of global media every bit guardians against political intrusion past strange TNCs, and puts claims of systematic exploitation of workers, payment of low wages and sweatshop conditions into doubt. On the other hand, he stresses external economies to the sites of investment, the spillover of know-how and technology also as the learning effect for workers hitherto not familiar with mod industrial product. He reminds readers of the crucial role of domestic elites, putting much of the blame for the shortcomings of FDI-led growth strategies on endogenous problems and stressing the necessity of supportive country policies.

These arguments are well known to students of 1950s and 1960s development theory. Modernization theory rose to prominence during roughly the same time when the vertically integrated MNC came to be regarded as the dominant form of the business enterprise. It was picayune wonder therefore that scholars, at that fourth dimension, looked at the big industrial corporation as the catalyst of development processes. In line with the dominant economic paradigm of that time, hopes were predominantly directed at the institution of domestic industries, just scholars such as Walt W. Rostow always took the international dimension seriously, for case, the benefits of FDI inflows to a developing country'southward capital stock or of technological spillovers to the domestic sector. Following the neoliberal paradigm shift, directly investment by MNCs/TNCs moved fully at center stage and the import substitution model was replaced by export-led industrialization.

From the 1950s and 1960s, when dependency theorists attacked the ideas of Rostow and others, until today, critics have advanced ii lines of argument. The beginning may be termed 'bypass problem' and refers to the widely acknowledged fact that large parts of the globe remain blind spots on the global map of corporate investment decisions. The case in bespeak is Africa which received only 7.4% of the FDI attributed to developing countries in 2005.

The second and more than interesting argument for the purpose of this article may be termed 'exploitation problem' and refers to problems which ascend because of the presence of foreign investment. Dependency theorists argued that international capital produced consign enclaves in host countries, created few external economies, and had minimal effect on national economies every bit a whole. Accordingly, TNC investment only intensified the structural heterogeneity of the economies, corrupted domestic elites and further exacerbated the financial and technological dependence on the North. In the 1970s, critics developed these arguments further and pointed to the role of TNCs in shaping and exploiting an inherently uneven geography. At the forefront of this opinion was Stephen Hymer (1972), who predicted the continuing expansion of the multinational form of industrial system ("law of increasing business firm size"). In addition to this, he identified the hierarchical division of labor between geographical regions, which corresponds to the vertical partition of labor within the firm, as a central for the uneven graphic symbol of the mod world economic system ("law of uneven development"). This was referred to as new international division of labor between company headquarters in the North and dissimilar types of offshore 'global factories' in the S.

In sum, for critical geographers in detail, the TNC/MNC epitomized the contradiction betwixt physical fixity and mobility at the heart of the uneven geography of capitalism. Scholars such as David Harvey or Neil Smith regarded TNCs decision-makers as powerful prisoners in a securely ambivalent game, feverishly searching for more than advantageous conditions of product while contributing to geographical equalization at the same time (Smith, 1989). For these critics, the ongoing search for geographical solutions to the capitalist dilemma, that is the 'spatial fix' (Harvey, 1981), on the office of transnational capital put unlike regions on and off the map, promising individual countries modernization and progress, only to drop them like a hot potato shortly afterwards. Or equally Hymer (1972: 133) put it: "Equally [the TNC] crosses international boundaries, it pulls and tears at the social and political fabric and erodes the cohesiveness of national states. […] It creates bureaucracy rather than equality, and it spreads its benefits unequally."

The role of the state, critically commented upon in this quote by Hymer, has always been a major effect in the TNC literature. And the extent to which southern governments are able to influence investment decisions and to ensure that TNC investment in the Global S has positive effects continues to spark controversial discussions. In a stylized way, positions may again be traced back to discussions during the heyday of development economics. On the one manus are those who point to the decisive office of state policies in providing the sort of regulatory surroundings which allows for longer-term benefits of TNC activities and which differentiates the winners from the losers in the contest for northern FDI. Following the positive performance of Southeast Asian economies, emphasis is put on investments into national education systems and the research and evolution (R&D) infrastructure as preconditions for the knowledge spillovers associated with 'export-promoting' or 'outward-oriented' trade strategies. Current emphasis on 'good governance' by multilateral development organizations is a variant of this argument (Shah, 2006). Neoliberal apologists of TNC investment oftentimes give this argument a dissimilar twist and blame "bad domestic policies for harmful effects" of FDI (Bhagwati, 2007: 221–222).

One-sided positions like these accept regularly provoked opposition from more critical scholars, Hymer (1972), for instance, arguing in similarly ideological vein that MNCs "weaken political control because they span many countries and can escape national regulation" (p. 127) and "reduce the sovereignty of all nation-states" (p. 129). This was also the position of dependistas such as Osvaldo Sunkel, Theotonio dos Santos, or Andre Gunder Frank. Notwithstanding, Frank'south (1996: 34) admission to have "maybe underestimated [the East Asian tiger economies'] capacity for technological upgrading and new participation in the international sectionalisation of labor" reflects the gradual emergence of less ideological and unforgiving positions during the 1990s. Equally a consequence of this, the debate on the relationship between the (Northern) TNC and the (Southern) state has become more than differentiated and sophisticated. Crucially, this also includes a more cocky-critical tone in parts of the mainstream literature: Accept the recent commutation nearly the implications of offshore outsourcing for northern and southern economies between Paul Samuelson on the 1 side and his quondam students Jagdish Bhagwati and Gregory Mankiw on the other, or the Stiglitz–Williamson debate on the Washington Consensus, which includes the liberalization of FDI inflows amid its ten propositions.

It is obvious that at that place are a number of factors that intervene differently in a state'south capacity to positively influence the effects of TNC investments: the size of the country in question, strategic interest and motivation of TNC activities, economic structure, history, etc. In this context China is often cited as an instance of the extent to which governments in the Global South have bargaining power and are able to dictate their terms of investment. China's sheer size and political ability however, recent debates about the stalled implementation of a stricter labor law and the successful pressure against even bones labor rights exerted by northern capital (i.e., Usa companies via the American Sleeping room of Commerce) speaks a more sobering linguistic communication. It is oft overlooked that northern states and northern TNCs deed in bunco, pushing through their interests confronting southern actors by forming "protection networks" as Immanuel Wallerstein (2005) would take information technology. This serves every bit a reminder that i should be wary of i-sided arguments in the rugged terrain of state-TNC relations.

Read full affiliate

URL:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/commodity/pii/B9780080449104002364