A BS T R A C TThis article outlines a framework for the analysis of economic integration and its relation to the asymmetries of economic and social development. Consciously breaking with state-centric forms of social science, it argues for a research agenda that is more adequate to the exigencies and consequences of globalization than has traditionally been the case in 'development studies'. Drawing on earlier attempts to analyse the cross-border activities of rms, their spatial con gurations and developmental consequences, the article moves beyond these by proposing the framework of the 'global production network' (GPN). It explores the conceptual elements involved in this framework in some detail and then turns to sketch a stylized example of a GPN. The article concludes with a brief indication of the bene ts that could be delivered by research informed by GPN analysis. K E Y WO R D SGlobalization; economic development; business networks; institutions; embeddedness.The analysis of economic development has been bedevilled by a series of analytic disjunctions that have resulted in work either at macro or meso levels of abstraction or, where empirical investigations have probed micro level processes, the larger analytic picture has often been absent, merely implicit, or at best weakly developed. While there are notable exceptions to this general rule (for instance, Armstrong and McGee, 1985) behind it lies half a century and more of scholarship in development economics (irrespective of its paradigmatic stripe) and in the political economy and sociology of development. 1 What is more, from the beginnings of 'dependency' approaches to development in the 1940s through to debates over the respective roles of states and markets in the East

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Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to ‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter‐firm networks – such as the global commodity chain approach – has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between ‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the ‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi‐scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development.

A vast and continually expanding literature on economic globalization continues to generate a miasma of conflicting viewpoints and alternative discourses. This article argues that any understanding of the global economy must be sensitive to four considerations: (a) conceptual categories and labels carry with them the discursive power to shape material processes; (b) multiple scales of analysis must be incorporated in recognition of the contemporary 'relativization of scale'; (c) no single institutional or organizational locus of analysis should be privileged; and (d) extrapolations from specific case studies and instances must be treated with caution, but this should not preclude the option of discussing the global economy, and power relations within it, as a structural whole. This paper advocates a network methodology as a potential framework to incorporate these concerns. Such a methodology requires us to identify actors in networks, their ongoing relations and the structural outcomes of these relations. Networks thus become the foundational unit of analysis for our understanding of the global economy, rather than individuals, firms or nation states. In presenting this argument we critically examine two examples of network methodology that have been used to provide frameworks for analysing the global economy: global commodity chains and actor-network theory. We suggest that while they fall short of fulfilling the promise of a network methodology in some respects, they do provide indications of the utility of such a methodology as a basis for understanding the global economy.Despite -or perhaps because of -the immense and fast-growing literature on globalization, we remain a long way from really understanding what is happening in the global economy. As Storper (1997b: 20) rightly points out, 'the theoretical meaning and practical impact of economic globalization remains obscure'. The literature on economic globalization continues to generate a miasma of conflicting viewpoints and alternative discourses (see Hirst

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With the aid of an empirical case study of the automobile industry in China, we explore how, under certain political^economic conditions, the investments of transnational corporations (TNCs) can be shaped to meet the state's objectives. We develop the concept of`obligated embeddedness' to capture the dynamics of this process. We show that foreign direct investment in the automobile industry in China is a type of market-led and embedded investment which is characterised by joint ventures and the follow-up network configurations. However, to achieve such obligated embeddedness on the part of TNCsöand for the state and its citizens to gain its benefits öthe state not only has to have the theoretical capacity to control access to assets located within its territory, but also the power actually to determine such access.

The role of space and place in shaping the transformation of firms and industries and the impact of such transformations on the wider processes of territorial development at local, regional, national, and global scales are basic research issues in economic geography. Such analyses tend to be compartmentalized, focusing on a specific economic activity or on a specific territory, rather than on the relationships between them. It is difficult simultaneously to conceptualize economic activities (including such phenomena as firms, industries, and other types of systems of networked economic activity), on the one hand, and territorially defined economies, on the other. In this paper, we address the interconnections between economic activities and territories through an exploration of the mutually constitutive relationships between firms and territories: the firm‐territory nexus. The focus of our analysis is the nexus of three major dimensions—firms, industrial systems, and territories—embedded in turn in the overall macro dimension of governance systems.

Over the years, geographers have developed a disturbing – even dysfunctional – habit of missing out on important intellectual and politically significant debates, even those in which geographers would seem to have a major role to play. The syndrome of processes currently bundled together within the term ‘globalization’ is intrinsically geographical, as are the outcomes of such processes. Yet, once again, it seems, we are not, as a discipline, centrally involved in what are clearly very ‘big issues’ indeed. The purpose of this paper is to explore, in the context of ongoing globalization debates, the bases of this undesirable situation and to consider what might be done to redress it in ways that could both enhance intra‐ and interdisciplinarity and also make a contribution towards building a better world.