Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Contributions in Economics & Economic History)

In the past two decades, industrialization on a world scale has undergone significant shifts. This volume develops a new set of conceptual categories for analyzing new patterns of global economic organization. The contributors to this volume explore and elaborate the global commodity chains (GCCs) approach, which reformulates the basic conceptual categories for analyzing new patterns of global organization and change. The GCC framework allows the authors to pose questions about contemporary development issues that are not easily handled by previous paradigms and 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. The paradigm that GCCs embody is a network-centered, historical approach that probes above and below the level of the nation-state to better analyze structure and change in the contemporary world.