This article locates the reorganization of work relations in the apparel sector in Pakistan, after the end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quota regime, within the context of a global production network (GPN). We examine the role of a network of corporate, state, multilateral and civil society actors who serve as intermediaries in GPN governance. These intermediaries transmit and translate competitive pressures and invoke varied, sometimes contradictory, imaginaries in their efforts to realign and stabilize the GPN. We analyse the post-MFA restructuring of Pakistan’s apparel sector, which dramatically increased price competition and precipitated a contested adjustment process among Pakistani and global actors with divergent priorities and resources. These intermediaries converged on a ‘solution’ that combined and enacted imaginaries of modernization, competitiveness, professional management and female empowerment, while also emphasizing low costs and female docility. We highlight the intersection of economic, political and cultural dynamics of GPNs, and reveal the gendered dimensions of GPN restructuring. We theorize the role of these actors as a transnational managerial elite in GPN governance, who led a restructuring process that preserved the hegemonic stability of the GPN and protected the interests of western branded apparel companies and consumers, but did not necessarily serve the interests of workers.
This case study of the restructuring of Pakistan’s garment manufacturing industry explores how attempts to increase capital’s control over the labour process intersect with local patriarchal structures and trigger workers’ reflexivity and agency causing unanticipated consequences. Using Archer’s notion of agency, the article examines the theoretical space where capitalism meets patriarchy, and both are reproduced. The focus on reflexivity, anchored between objective contexts and agents’ personal concerns, helps theorize capital–labour–gender relations in global supply chains and explains workers’ impactful resistance to protect a supposedly precarious work regime. Our findings challenge the notion that globalization reduces workers’ agency and their potential for impactful resistance.
Physical capital and labour force are two major factors of any economy, which play a key role in its growth. The association of these two components with each other is also a matter of study, which is carried out in this endeavour by means of an ecological system with Holling-type II function. The governing model is an avantgrade approach for economic theory as its equilibrium states and the stability analysis so obtained, referrer to different economic states with detail information about the capital-labour interaction. This novel assessment also contributes a significant way to scrutinize the capability of labours on consuming time on the capital and the efficiency of capital on processing output. Moreover, different patterns and cyclic behaviour of the Cobb-Douglas and constant-elasticity production functions, for different steady and oscillating states of the system are also provided comparatively. In addition, a numerical example is also discussed graphically with economic significance. These measurements will consequently keep the production cycle moving and so sustain the economic growth.
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