Resource-Sensitive Global Production Networks: Reconfigured Geographies of Timber and Acoustic Guitar Manufacturing

Gibson, Chris; Warren, Andrew

doi:10.1080/00130095.2016.1178569

Cited by 53 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…Peer‐reviewed publications that use robust scientific methods and avoid misrepresentations of transparency data (Gardner et al., ) would be of significant interest to media, NGOs, and corporate actors, especially given the high level of trust enjoyed by academics. Media coverage and NGO campaigns can produce improvements in corporate supply chains or alert regulatory agencies with remit to punish environmental crimes (Gibson & Warren, ). Both NGOs and academics have collaborated with industry to audit and improve certification schemes (Dauvergne, ; Gibbs et al., ).…”

Section: Why and How Should Academics Study Individual Corporations Amentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why academics should study the supply chains of individual corporations

Goldstein

Newell

2019

J of Industrial Ecology

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Although fields such as industrial ecology have advanced our understanding of how cleaner technologies, recycling, and lifestyle changes can reduce the impacts of production and consumption on people and planet, environmental deterioration and social injustices stubbornly persist. New strategies are needed to achieve change in an era of increasing urgency. This paper proposes that academics study the supply chains of individual corporations and link them to environmental and social impacts in geographically specific areas. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have used this approach successfully, issuing reports about corporate activity related to deforestation, sweatshops, and other issues of social concern. But academics, by and large, have studied generic products, industries, and sectors. To verify this, after reviewing approximately 11,000 studies on supply chains, we identified just 27 academic papers that focused on individual corporations. These were primarily by NGOs and social scientists, with no studies by industrial ecologists meeting our review criteria. To uncover corporate supply chains, researchers used two distinct methodological approaches: in situ (interviews, surveys, and surveillance) and ex situ (trade data, document analysis, and maps). In this paper, we explain why and how academics should study the supply chains of individual corporations. This is done by combining approaches from industrial ecology, with those from geography, sociology, and other social sciences to develop a political‐industrial ecology of supply chains. This both physically links actual product flows with their environmental impacts, and explores how they affect justice, equity, and welfare. The work we propose offers clear collaborative linkages with NGOs, industry, and the media.

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Section: Why and How Should Academics Study Individual Corporations Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proactive companies will sometimes collaborate with stakeholders to develop sustainability standards. Recalcitrant companies may risk legal action by NGOs and regulatory agencies (Gibson & Warren, 2016;Spar & La Mure, 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Why academics should study the supply chains of individual corporations

Goldstein

Newell

2019

J of Industrial Ecology

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“…Deeper social histories of seemingly natural commodities can be traced (Head et al, 2012). Commodities are also often framed within inclusive Global Production Network (GPN) approaches examining diverse actors, power, discourse, and materiality (Coe et al, 2008; Gibson and Warren, 2016). But how can quantitative economic geographies converse with and complement such accounts, accounts that tend to rely upon relational notions of space and economy?…”

Section: Economic-geographic Quantification and Its Discontentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards economic geographies beyond the Nature-Society divide

Bergmann

2017

Geoforum

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This article suggests an approach to economic-geographic quantification that is relevant to engaging the socionatural blurring of an Anthropocene. It develops representations of commodities and of economies that draw upon concepts of absolute, relative, and relational space to help move beyond legacies of the Nature-Society divide in economic-geographic thought. To supplement familiar ways of knowing commodities as bounded objects with associated single values (prices), the piece rereads input-output approaches, providing accounts of how commodities enfold relations among socionatural phenomena. It quantifies and maps the activities and flows of the global economy in 2007 in terms of their embodied carbon emissions, labor times, and harvested land areas alongside their monetary values. Comparing the perspectives that result, it identifies empirical and theoretical challenges that a political-industrial ecology could help address.

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“…Ciccantell and Smith (2009) argued that material and locational attributes of the primary sector influence production networks in distinctive ways: they highlight, for example, how large and lumpy capital investments are frequently required to mobilize raw materials via ports and pipelines, and the dynamic interaction of scale economies in raw material production and transportation (see also Bunker and Ciccantell 2005). Gibson and Warren's (2016) description of a "resource-sensitive global production networks" showed how shortages of traditional hardwoods (which have prized qualities of resonance, strength, and beauty) and environmental regulation influence the organization and spatiality of acoustic guitar manufacturing, leading to both fragmentation and concentration within the production chain. In a similar way, Crang et al's (2013) research on economies of waste highlighted the profound heterogeneity of materials encountered in waste flows and how the corresponding need for fine-grained sorting gives intermediary brokers (rather than large lead firms) a key role within waste value chains because of their capacity for assessing material quality.…”

Section: Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So far, the center of gravity of the GPN research framework has been manufacturing, where it has been adopted to understand functional and geographic integration in a range of sectors from aircraft (Bowen 2007) and automobiles (Isaksen and Kalsaas 2009) to textiles (Tokatli, Wrigley, and Kizilgün 2008) and wood products (Murphy 2012;Gibson and Warren 2016). However, recent work has taken GPN into less familiar terrain, to examine producer services such as temporary staffing (Coe, Johns, and Ward 2011), freight forwarding (Bowen and Leinbach 2006;Rodrigue 2006), the creative sector (Johns 2006;Yoon and Malecki 2010), and extractive industries (Bridge 2008;Steen and Underthun 2011;Bridge and Le Billon 2013;MacKinnon 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making a Global Gas Market: Territoriality and Production Networks in Liquefied Natural Gas

2017

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Energy markets are an important contemporary site of economic globalization. In this article we use a global production network (GPN) approach to examine the evolutionary dynamics of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector and its role in an emerging global market for natural gas. We extend recent work in the relational economic geography literature on the organizational practices by which production networks are assembled and sustained over time and space; and we address a significantly underdeveloped aspect of GPN research by demonstrating the implications of these practices for the territoriality of GPNs. The article introduces LNG as a technomaterial reconfiguration of natural gas that enables it to be moved and sold beyond the continental limits of pipelines. We briefly outline the evolving scale and geographic scope of LNG trade, and introduce the network of firms, extraeconomic actors, and intermediaries through which LNG production, distribution, and marketing are coordinated. Our analysis shows how LNG is evolving from a relatively simple floating pipeline model of point-topoint, binational flows orchestrated by producing and consuming companies and governed by longterm contracts, to a more geographic and organizationally complex production network that is constitutive of an emergent global gas market. Empirically the article provides the first systematic analysis within economic geography of the globalization of the LNG sector and its influence on global gas markets, demonstrating the potential of GPN (and related frameworks) to contribute meaningful analysis of the contemporary political economy of energy. Conceptually the article pushes research on GPN to realize more fully its potential as an analysis of network territoriality by examining how the spatial configuration of GPNs emerges from the organizational structures and coordinating strategies of firms, extraeconomic actors and intermediaries; and by recognizing how network territoriality is constitutive of markets rather than merely responsive to them.

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Resource-Sensitive Global Production Networks: Reconfigured Geographies of Timber and Acoustic Guitar Manufacturing

Cited by 53 publications

References 45 publications

Why academics should study the supply chains of individual corporations

Why academics should study the supply chains of individual corporations

Towards economic geographies beyond the Nature-Society divide

Making a Global Gas Market: Territoriality and Production Networks in Liquefied Natural Gas

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