Editor’s Introduction: Commodity Chains in and of the World System

In the two decades since the publication of Gereffi and Korzeniwicz's (1994) ground-breaking edited volume, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, scholars have conducted a vast quantity of research on international production networks. 1 Today there are voluminous literatures on constructs that are or would appear, at least morphologically, to be similar to the structure that Hopkins and W allerstein defined as a "network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity" ( 1986: 159). Although the commodity chain, or one of its later variants, has been widely mobilized to address concerns quite distinct from those of its creators, the provenance of the concept in world-systems analysis is often noted (Raikes, Jensen and Ponte 2000; Leslie and Reimer 1999; Le Heron and Stringer 2012; Fernandes 2010). The term was first introduced by Hopkins and Wallerstein in a 1977 article outlining a research program to study patterns of development of the modem world-system. Specifically, they proposed to follow the production networks of particular commodities as a way to trace the incorporation of new areas into an emergent worldwide division of labor during the long sixteenth century. Observing that the sequential steps involved in the creation, cultivation , and transportation of a particular good could be conceived as a commodity chain, they and their colleagues studied several specific chains to ascertain where these activities were carried out, and how the unequal returns to these activities created a stratified world-system. During the 1990s, in the context of growing academic and popular interest in what was perceived to be a novel and/or intensified phase of globalization, the commodity chain concept grew in popularity as one of the few analytical methods available for studying the growing complexity of international production networks. A new set of scholars~many of whom were unfamiliar with the macro-historical tradition of commodity chain research~embraced the chain construct to analyze changing industrial geographies, the rise of organizational practices such as outsourcing and off-shoring, and the implications of these developments for both core economies and developing countries. As the commodity chain concept gained currency, it began to circulate far beyond the community of PEWS scholars that coined it, complicating the relationship between commodity chain analysis and world-systems analysis. The clearest indication of this growing estrangement was a marked change in the conceptualization of commodity chains as potential pathways for development or upward mobility. Accepting that all commodity chains include a combination of "core" activities (those earning relatively high returns) and "peripheral" activities (those earning relatively low returns), commodity chain analysts nevertheless observed that the mix of activities