The impact of e‐commerce on Chinese suppliers' upgrading in global value chains in a digitalized era

Abstract

This study investigates the challenges Chinese manufacturing suppliers face in global value chains (GVCs) and how they respond to the challenges through GVC upgrading facilitated by e‐commerce. A multiple case study approach on nine case companies of three company size categories in the Chinese nonwoven fabric product industry was employed. The findings reveal four categories of internal challenges (i.e., a product development challenge, a human resource challenge, a financial resource challenge, and an intellectual resource challenge) and two categories of external challenges (i.e., a market challenge and a macroeconomic challenge) faced by the Chinese suppliers in the e‐commerce context. Furthermore, strategic responses undertaken by Chinese manufacturers are identified and are further related to various types of economic, environmental, and social upgrading by applying the GVC framework. Unlike most extant research on the phenomenon of sourcing from China that approaches it from the viewpoint of global buyers, this study examines the phenomenon from the perspective of Chinese suppliers. Through the theoretical lens of GVC analysis and its core concept of upgrading, this study contributes to GVC research by shedding light on the impact of e‐commerce on suppliers' GVC upgrading practices.

Technological capabilities and global value chains: insights from Spanish SMEs in the hotel industry

“…The GVC literature points out that the prevalent governance regime influences the upgrading of SMEs (Romero and Tejada, 2020; Su et al , 2021). However, no consensus exists on the sign of this influence (Jiang et al , 2022).…”

“…Conversely, other studies find that the firms participating in a GVC are subordinated to actors that exert control over the chain (Jiang et al, 2022). This dependence undermines the ability of SMEs to innovate and, therefore, may limit their capacity to generate added value (OECD, 2008).…”

“…Although the roles played by several types of tourism intermediaries are explored in this paper, tour operators are the main focus of this study. Previous studies suggest that they are the agents who assume the governance of TGVCs (Erkuş-Öztürk and Terhor, 2010; Jiang et al , 2022; Picazo and Moreno-Gil, 2018; Romero and Tejada, 2020). For the purposes of our study, the label tour operator will refer to a foreign (not Spanish) firm that provides a package of all or most of the components of an offered trip, specifically hotel stays, in order to sell them to tourists.…”

“…The literature on global value chains (GVCs) could prove to be beneficial for this ongoing debate in the field of tourism research. Although, in general, this literature has focused more on the manufacturing sector than on the service sector (McWilliam et al , 2020), over the last decade, a growing number of studies in the tourism field have used several concepts of the GVC theoretical framework to analyse certain aspects of the supply and demand of hotel companies (Jiang et al , 2022; Mosedale, 2006). Specifically, in those studies that analyse the relationship between global tourism intermediaries and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) hotels, the concepts of governance and upgrading have proved to be very useful (Romero and Tejada, 2011).…”

Research on emotion analysis of e-commerce product reviews based on deep learning

“…The progress of the times has led to the rapid development of e-commerce, which has also changed the production and life style of the whole society [1][2] . At the same time, with the development of Internet transactions, a large number of commodity reviews have emerged, which are important components of public opinion.…”