From Commodity Chains to Value Chains and Back Again?

This paper assesses the achievements and limitations of the commodity chains framework as it has evolved over the last near-decade, and concludes by suggesting directions for future research. First, I examine the evolution of the chain approach by briefly discussing the differences between the two camps that employ the commodity chain concept: the world-systems school (whose proponents coined the phrase) and the global commodity chain (GCC) camp that has developed around the work of Gary Gereffi and colleagues. Second, I highlight the contributions that the GCC literature has made in the areas of methodology, theory, and policy. Third, I discuss a recent change in nomenclature that has occurred within the GCC camp, as some scholars have argued that the more inclusive language of value chains should replace the more specific concept of commodity chain. In this section, I evaluate the concept of industrial upgrading, which figures prominently in the value chains literature and conclude that while the upgrading problematic is particularly relevant and useful for policy discussions, its micro-orientation focuses our attention narrowly on the firm level, and thus fails to inform a more sociological and comprehensive analysis of the social processes and spatial dynamics of uneven development in the global economy. In the fourth section, I briefly identify fruitful directions for commodity chains research that might address some of the weaknesses inherent in the value chain literature. Specifically I argue that GCC research should focus on the regulatory, institutional, and systemic factors that shape commodity chains and condition the development outcomes associated with them. In laying out this agenda, I draw on a number of recent contributions which suggest that a second generation of commodity chain research can already be discerned. Arguably, a general consensus has characterized the field of development studies for more than two decades. The failure of state-led industrialization models in much of the former Third World and the debt crisis of the 1980s, as well as the success of East Asia’s export-oriented economies, has been interpreted as evidence that integration into the global economy is the only option for developing countries to pursue. While recent criticisms of the neoliberal paradigm have argued that the state still has a role to play in facilitating development (Amsden 2001; Rodrik 2002), even critics of the market-radical versions of the prevailing orthodoxy nevertheless appear to take as self-evident the proposition that the goal for developing countries is increased competitiveness in world markets. In this context, it is not surprising that the global commodity chains (GCC) framework has inspired and oriented a spate of recent scholarship attempting to incorporate analyses of globalization into development studies. While many observers have noted the “impasse” or “disarray” plaguing development studies since the neoliberal turn across much of the former Third World (Manzo 1991; Portes 1997; Robinson 2002), the GCC approach has been regarded as something of an exception to this general malaise. British sociologist Jeffrey Henderson contends that the GCC framework “foregrounds in news ways the dialectic of possibility and constraint associated with industrialization in the developing world and industrial transformation elsewhere. In so doing it has the capacity to show empirically the nature of the benefits and limitations on economic and social development that derive from the particular forms which global economic linkage takes” (1996: 405; also Raikes et al 2000). Furthermore, the steady increase in contributions to the GCC 1 A lively debate continues about the lessons to be drawn from the “East Asian miracle”, however. As has been widely noted (Amsden 1994; Wade 1996; Berger and Beeson 1998), the World Bank’s well-known assessment of the region’s success (1993) relied on a partial reading that emphasized the soundness of the region’s macroeconomic fundamentals and downplayed the prevalence of factors, such as industrial policy, that departed from neoliberal orthodoxy. 2 The GCC framework is not without its critics, however. One might summarize these critics as making two main points. First, the empirical scope of this literature is too narrow, with most studies to date focusing primarily on commodity chains in a relatively small number of manufacturing industries and concentrating almost exclusively on only one of the four chain dimensions specified in the framework, (governance structure) at the expense of the other three (Henderson et al. 2002). Second, GCC research has not