Book reviewed:
Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds.
COMMODITY CHAINS AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM. Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 1994. xiv + 334 pp. ISBN
0-313-28914-X, $59.95 (hardcover); ISBN
0-275-94573-1, $22.95 (paper).
Reviewed by
Wilma A. Dunaway and Donald A. Clelland
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Copyright (c) Wilma Dunaway and Donald A. Clelland 1995.
v.10/4/95
Despite early recognition of its
theoretical centrality (Immanuel Wallerstein,
HISTORICAL CAPITALISM, 1983, pp. 13-16), the
"commodity chain" has been inadequately
conceptualized by world-system researchers. This
book aims to correct that deficiency by aggregating
papers that were presented at the 1992 annual
conference of the Political Economy of the
World-System Section of the American Sociological
Association. The book is organized around four
themes: commodity chains in the capitalist
world-economy prior to 1800; the economic
restructuring of commodity chains; the geographic
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organization of commodity chains; and the shaping
role of core consumption upon shifts in peripheral
production and distribution.
Each of the articles is rich in empirical
details that reflect lengthy and involved research
on the part of the writers; the book, as a whole,
provides the basis for comparing trends in several
different countries and industries. That dense
detail is condensed through the use of 21 tables
and 34 commodity chain diagrams and maps. When we
used this book in a Fall, 1994 graduate seminar, we
quickly became aware that the book's preoccupation
with the presentation of that empirical detail is
also its primary weakness. Most of the articles
focus upon documenting the various nodes and
linkages that comprise the production and/or
distribution processes involved in several
different international industries. The
editors declare that COMMODITY CHAINS fleshes out,
for the first time, the "global commodity chains
approach." Theoretically, this volume never
achieves that goal. Indeed, we are disappointed to
find so little world-system theory in a volume
derived from a PEWS Conference. In addition to
seven pages by Hopkins and Wallerstein, the index
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enumerates only seven brief references to
"world-system theory," out of 311 pages of
substantive content! For our graduate seminar, we
repeatedly were forced to demonstrate how the
assigned readings contributed to world-system
theory, for most of the writers get caught up in a
descriptive style or fail to link their
explanations with world-system theory.
Even more fundamentally, we are troubled by
the absence of a key world-systems notion. Hidden,
only once (p. 49), Hopkins and Wallerstein
introduce what they consider to be the pivotal
question that should be addressed in commodity
chain analysis: "If one thinks of the entire chain
as having a total amount of surplus value that has
been appropriated, what is the division of this
surplus value among the boxes of the chain?"
Surprisingly, this central idea is ignored by the
other contributors. None of the articles in this
volume directly analyzes the extraction of surplus
between the nodes of the chains or the exploitation
of labor that occurs in the many processes.
Instead, the editors contend that the global
commodity chains approach "promotes a nuanced
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analysis of world-economic spatial inequalities in
terms of differential access to markets and
resources" (p.2). Without adequate linkage to
broader world-system arguments, that line
of reasoning sounds more like a disquieting
apparition from the work of Rostow than a
conceptual extension of world-system theory.
What never appears in this book is the key
idea that lies at the heart of understanding the
international division of labor: unequal
exchange. There is little or no attention to the
central world-system thesis that exploitation and
domination are structured at multiple levels of the
commodity chains that are so painstakingly
depicted. COMMODITY CHAINS makes a needed
beginning; but its proposed framework will not be
soundly grounded in world-systems theory until it
factors in the messy inequities that really result
from the neat boxes and lines in the commodity
chain diagrams. We will lose sight of the research
agenda for social change that Wallerstein (REVIEW,
1 (1-2), 1977) originally proposed for world-system
analysis if we get caught up in an approach that
"explains the distribution of wealth ... as an
outcome of the relative intensity of competition
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within different nodes" (p. 4). Mainstream
economists embrace exactly that kind of
"free-market" language to account for the
polarization between the First and Third Worlds.
The "ghosts of theories past" linger in the
verbiage of too many of these articles; and the
commodity networks are described with a
mechanical coldness that ignores the human
exploitation that propels capitalism.
Even though Wallerstein (WORLD INEQUALITY,
1975, pp. 9-29) declared it dead twenty years ago,
developmentalism leaps off the pages of this book
more often than world-system theory. We do not
entirely direct that criticism toward the editors,
for the shortcomings of this book derive from
a fundamental flaw in the annual PEWS Conferences.
Most of the papers presented at those meetings are
atheoretical descriptions of the international
arena; moreover, too many of the participants make
no pretense of grounding their research within the
world-system framework. If this trend continues,
these annual volumes will accumulate a body of
literature barely distinguishable as world-system
analysis. Because there has been inadequate
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attention to theoretical debates, these conference
proceedings have degenerated into hodgepodges of
disjointed viewpoints.
That strategy does not build an accumulated body of
research and knowledge that we should be labelling
world-system analysis.
It is too late to correct the flaws in
COMMODITY CHAINS. However, we would urge a
proactive strategy on the part of future editors of
the PEWS collections. If the contributed chapters
are atheoretical, they should be revised so that
their world-system explanations are clearly drawn
-- even when that requires summarizing more briefly
the descriptive details. When the contributor
offers an antagonistic viewpoint (and we are
convinced that the writers are often unaware they
are leaning those directions), other alternatives
should be considered. First, the editor should
contemplate omitting such an article from a volume
that purports to represent the state of the
world-system field. Or, the editor might
incorporate such a piece by having the writer
specify directly his or her debate with
world-system explanations.
--
Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222
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