Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Production Networks: A New Paradigm for a Changing World

By S. Barrientos, Gary Gereffi, Arianna Rossi. 2011

773 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A key challenge in promoting decent work worldwide is how to improve the position of both firms and workers in value chains and global production networks driven by lead firms. This article develops a framework for analysing the linkages between the economic upgrading of firms and the social upgrading of workers. Drawing on studies which indicate that firm upgrading does not necessarily lead to improvements for workers, with a particular focus on the Moroccan garment industry, it outlines different trajectories and scenarios to provide a better understanding of the relationship between economic and social upgrading.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ebfab47a15c79a0de339fe5345eddcf571bf3e64

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Citations in the corpus

Why the World Suddenly Cares About Global Supply Chains (2012, background): “labor conditions, or social downgrading (Barrientos et al. 2011).”
Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains and Industrial Clusters: Why Governance Matters (2014, background): “upgrading is more likely to occur, and how that relates to economic upgrading (Barrientos et al. 2011).”
Squeezing workers’ rights in global supply chains: purchasing practices in the Bangladesh garment export sector in comparative perspective (2020, background): “For Barrientos, Gereffi, and Rossi (2011), economic upgrading is understood as moving to higher value-added activities.”
Global value chains in a post-Washington Consensus world (2014, background): “…trade and investment patterns toward more robust employment outcomes (OECD, 2012), the challenge will be to link economic upgrading and social upgrading in terms of both material conditions of work and the quantity and quality of jobs created in contemporary GVCs (Barrientos et al., 2011a, 2011b).”
Social Upgrading and Labour in Global Production Networks: A Critique and an Alternative Conception (2013, background): “This presumed causal relationship, however, derives from neo-classical economics rather than real-world empirical observations (Bernhardt & Milberg, 2011).”
Corporate Social Responsibility in Garment Sourcing Networks: Factory Management Perspectives on Ethical Trade in Sri Lanka (2015, background): “More widely, numerous researchers discuss widespread economic upgrading of the global apparel value network, while acknowledging that social upgrading remains somewhat more challenging to achieve (Barrientos et al., 2011; Bernhardt, 2013).”
Towards a typology of repositioning strategies of GVC/GPN suppliers: the case of functional upgrading and downgrading (2016, background): “In contrast to upgrading, the concept of downgrading has received much less attention and remains rather underdeveloped (for exceptions, see: Gibbon, 2001; Ponte and Ewert, 2009; Cattaneo et al., 2010; Barrientos et al., 2011; Rabellotti, 2014; Smith et al., 2014).”
Rana Plaza collapse aftermath: Are CSR compliance and auditing pressures effective? (2016, methodology): “…show that the impact of social upgrading is rather unevenly distributed between different groups of workers, such as skilled and unskilled (e.g. Barrientos et al., 2011), regular and irregular (e.g. Barrientos and Kritzinger, 2004; Rossi, 2011), and male and female (e.g. Barrientos et al.,…”