Cultural political economy meets global production networks: a productive meeting?

By Ray Hudson. 2008

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, I explore some of the implications of pursuing a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to the analysis of global production networks (GPNs). This raises three sets of issues: the current state of knowledge about GPNs; the current state of knowledge about CPE and the current state of relationships between analyses of GPNs and CPE. GPNs can be seen as encompassing the entirety of the circuit of production and to be constituted via a variety of flows (of capital in various forms such as commodities and money, knowledge and people) between a variety of nodes, sites and spaces (of production, exchange and consumption), with varying governance arrangements, both multi-scalar (supra-national, national, regional and urban) and non-scalar networked forms of governance. As these are Global Production Networks these nodes and the flows linking them are, by definition, distributed around the globe, albeit unevenly. CPE seeks to conjoin a more thorough treatment of the semiotic to more established concepts of political economy and there has been some considerable success in this regard [for example see Jessop and Sum ( Beyond the Regulation Approach. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)]. As yet, however, there has been little serious engagement with the materiality of the economy and so with the relations between the material, semiotic and political economic within CPE. A similar criticism can be made of work on GPNs. Integrating considerations of the materiality of the economy more systematically enriches a CPE perspective, while exploring common ground between CPE and GPN approaches enables these advantages to be translated into the latter and further enhance its conceptual reach.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d38e02644c73987e7d2956dc3b5bdbae79025ea6

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Citations in the corpus

Geographies of circulation and exchange: constructions of markets (2009, background): “…addition to the processes at the heart of institutional political economy (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop and Sum, 2006; Sayer, 2001; see also Hudson, 2008). the past have largely ceased to exist, transnational mobility of capital, goods and labor contributing to the erosion of the…”
Rethinking governance and value in commodity chains through global recycling networks (2013, unknown): “To adapt Piero Sraffa’s adage, commodities are made from old(er) commodities (Hudson 2008, 433).”
Stretching Global Production Networks: The International Second-hand Clothing Trade (2013, background): “Global Production Networks (GPN) studies have mapped some of the changing geographies of the global economy and the impacts of broadly defined „globalisation‟ by linking together the design of new commodities, the sourcing of constituent parts and the processes of production, transport and sale (Hen”
From beginnings and endings to boundaries and edges: rethinking circulation and exchange through electronic waste (2011, background): “For us linearity is not only a problem of simplifying economic activity as a linear flow (cf. Hudson 2008b); nor is it only a problem associated with removing economic activity from the spatial, social and embodied context in which it is embedded.”
Toward a Dynamic Theory of Global Production Networks (2015, background): “…organizations, are generally seen as effective in influencing sourcing strategies of certain 50 kinds of lead firms such as major retailers and their domestic and foreign suppliers in the agrofood and apparel industries (Freidberg 2004; Hughes, Wrigley, and Buttle 2008; Barnett et al. 2011).”