Gendered Commodity Chains

Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production

Wilma A. Dunaway, Wilma A. Dunaway

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804788960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Gendered Commodity Chains is the first book to consider the fundamental role of gender in global commodity chains. It challenges long-held assumptions of global economic systems by identifying the crucial role social reproduction plays in production and by declaring the household as an important site of production. In affirming the importance of women's work in global production, this cutting-edge volume fills an important gender gap in the field of global commodity and value chain analysis.With thirteen chapters by an international group of scholars from sociology, anthropology, economics, women's studies, and geography, this volume begins with an eye-opening feminist critique of existing commodity chain literature. Throughout its remaining five parts, Gendered Commodity Chains addresses ways women's work can be integrated into commodity chain research, the forms women's labor takes, threats to social reproduction, the impact of indigenous and peasant households on commodity chains, the rapidly expanding arenas of global carework and sex trafficking, and finally, opportunities for worker resistance. This broadly interdisciplinary volume provides conceptual and methodological guides for academics, graduate students, researchers, and activists interested in the gendered nature of commodity chains.

PART I

FEMINIST CRITIQUES AND ADVANCES OF COMMODITY CHAIN ANALYSIS

CHAPTER ONE

A Feminist Approach to Overcoming the Closed Boxes of the Commodity Chain

Jane Collins

Several years ago, Leslie McCall (2005: 772) posed this question: “What happens when particular methods become conflated with particular philosophies of science [in ways that] prevent freer flow of knowledge?” She was writing about the faithful and nearly monogamous relationship between quantitative sociological methods and positivism. But it is possible to raise the same question about the way in which business frameworks steeped in marginalist economics have hijacked the study of commodity chains. Has the study of commodity chains become so conflated with the philosophies of science that underpin neoclassical economics that we can no longer use them for other, more subversive ends? What are the prospects and possible models for critical versions of commodity chain analysis?

THE “BLACK BOX” OF THE COMMODITY

A quote from cultural critic Susan Willis (1991: 52) sums up much that is fascinating about commodity chain research: “If, as Marx defined them, commodities are the containers of hidden relationships . . . those social relationships are all the more concealed by the movement of production to the Third World.” Willis’s statement points to the mystery that Marx argued was inherent in commodities—they are “containers of hidden social relations.” Cracking them open—that is, examining the materiality of their production and circulation—allows us to recover some of what neoclassical economics makes us forget: living, breathing, gendered, and raced bodies working under social relations that exploit them; bodies living in households with persons who depend on them and on whom they depend; and bodies who enter into the work of making a living with liveliness, creativity, and skill.

Wilma Dunaway (2003b) maps this mystery beautifully. She argues that creative applications of commodity chain analysis can make visible not only the waged labor in fields or factories that gives a commodity its value, but also the unwaged labor in families and households that produced the laborers themselves. She also points to another mystery hidden in the commodity’s black box that the method can help probe: the subsidy drawn from nature when capitalists and consumers destroy and deplete resources. Traditional economic analysis and those versions of commodity chain analysis that accept its premises consider both social reproductive labor and environmental costs “externalities.” Dunaway (2003b: 196) suggests that commodity chain analysis, performed in other ways, can help make visible and begin to account for these “transfers of value that are embodied in commodities but do not show up in prices.”

Willis’s statement also points to the concealment of the social relationships that produce commodities when production and consumption are widely separated in space. Given that the larger context of the statement is a narrative that traces items in a grocery store to their origins, this is not a claim that distance makes the relationships unknowable, but rather an invitation to discern connection. Willis poses the challenge of tracking relationships across space and difference, of exploring our ties to people who may be unknown to us but who are linked to us across space and time by the goods that pass through our hands. The challenges of opening the black box of the commodity to reveal its hidden sources of value and of tracing these global connections can take us in a critical and liberatory direction that is distinct from the mechanistic approaches to commodity chain analysis that have gained popularity since the 1990s.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF COMMODITY CHAIN APPROACHES

Most accounts of the origins of commodity chain analysis locate it within world-systems analysis and date its origins to articles published in the journal Review of the Fernand Braudel Center in 1977 and 1986 by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. The influence of historian Fernand Braudel on world-systems theoreticians is well known, but Dunaway (2003b) has pointed to the study of commodities as a specific link between Braudel’s history and Hopkins and Wallerstein’s sociology. Braudel’s (1982) historical work focused on the material organization of society. His first volume of Civilization and Capitalism is titled The Structures of Everyday Life, and each chapter focuses on a commodity, from daily bread, food and drink, houses, and clothes and fashion to technology and money. Dunaway (2003b: 189) argues that Braudel used commodities to highlight connections between daily life and the flow of history. She writes, “By examining commodity chains, we can do the type of research that Braudel . . . loved; we can simultaneously overlay the ‘double register’ of history: the global and the local.”

Although Braudel’s method of connecting local and global was undoubtedly an influence, Wallerstein points to another reason for tracking the flow of commodities: “The whole commodity chain idea arose because Terry [Hopkins] and I wanted to show that what people were describing as very new in the late 20th century was part and parcel of the capitalist world-economy from the beginning. It was a way of spelling out our insistence that we were dealing with a world-economy and not with a series of autonomous states interacting.”¹ In fact, the Review articles on commodity chains mapped the analytical strategy that Wallerstein (1974, 1980) had pursued in his series of books titled The Modern World-System, in which he detailed the role that flows of gold and silver, textiles, and lumber—as well as the availability of salt cod and herring—had played in successive waves of struggle for hegemony in the world-economy. This analytic focus on commodities as a locus and a means of struggle for dominance was not unique to world-systems analysis but was shared by dependency theorists concerned with the Third World’s entrapment in the export of primary products and by Marxist theorists of unequal exchange (Love 1980).

Like most ideas, the commodity chain approach did not have a single point of origin. For anthropologists, the idea that one could understand how the global intersects with the local by tracing the flow of commodities derives from a very different body of work: the set of interlinked commodity studies carried out in the 1950s as part of Columbia University’s People of Puerto Rico project. Headed by anthropologist Julian Steward, the project examined how Puerto Rican communities were connected to the global economy through the production and trade of specific commodities. Sidney Mintz began his research on sugar under the auspices of this project, as did Elena Padilla Seda. Eric Wolf studied coffee communities; Robert Manners, tobacco; and Raymond Scheele, the elite families of the island as a whole (Steward 1956). Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner (2011: 989, 993) have written that commodity chain analysis should begin to take into account “layered histories and uneven geographies of capitalist expansion, disinvestment, and devaluation,” as well as the “historically particular sets of social relations [that] secure commodity production.”² If scholars broaden their view of antecedent work to include these earlier commodity studies, as well as subsequent anthropological research that has built on them, they gain a repository of historically grounded, sociologically rich models for conducting commodity chain analysis (e. g., Roseberry 1984; Mintz 1986; Striffler and Moberg 2004).

There are other traditions of commodity chain research as well. Jeffery Paige’s Agrarian Revolution (1978) documents the impacts of different configurations of export agriculture on local class relations in postcolonial settings. His Coffee and Power (1998) shows how elite domination of a particular export crop structured the entire economic and political system of several Central American nations in the twentieth century. Paige says that the People of Puerto Rico project, especially the work of Wolf and Mintz (Steward 1956), “had a profound influence” on his work. He also notes the importance of Harold Innis’s (1930, 1940) “staples thesis” of Canadian development and of Albert Hirschman’s (1977, 1986) reinterpretation and extension of it in shaping his approach to the study of commodities.³ All these authors emphasize social relations and power. Their work is steeped in history, and they actively interrogate the relationship between local and global. All of them incorporate economic, political, sociological, and even cultural aspects of life. What they do not account for very well are the multiple and intersecting dimensions of inequality that structure the flow of commodities.

Around 2000, a number of scholars studying commodity chains began to move in a very different direction. Projects like the Institute for Development Studies’ Innovation and Value Chain Initiative and Duke University’s Global Value Chains Initiative tried to standardize the method in ways that made it more consonant with traditional forms of economic and business analysis (Gereffiand Kaplinsky 2002). The mission statement of the Global Value Chains Initiative says that it “seeks to develop an industry-centric view of economic globalization” and “to test and develop the GVC framework with the aims of creating greater analytical precision, intellectual impact and policy relevance.⁴” One of the key essays (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005: 92) defining the Initiative’s approach contains the following explanation.

If a theory of value chain governance is to be useful to policy-makers, it should be parsimonious. It has to simplify and abstract from an extremely heterogeneous body of evidence. . . . Clearly history, institutions, geographic and social context . . . will influence how firms and groups of firms are linked in the global economy. . . . Our intention is to create the simplest framework that generates results relevant to real-world outcomes.

Focusing narrowly on competitiveness and industrial upgrading, these approaches have adopted the models and concepts of marginalist economics. In fact, Dunaway (2003b: 185) has suggested that they “have done the work of mainstream economists better than they do it themselves,” with the end result that their analyses emphasize things rather than people. Jennifer Bair (2005) argues that this work represents a definitive break with the world-systems-inspired tradition, moving research on commodity chains away from historical and holistic analyses and toward a network-based, organizational approach. Given these projects to standardize commodity chain analysis and to render it “mainstream,” what are the prospects for wresting back a version that is useful for exploring the gendered and raced mysteries of unaccounted value and global connection?

We do not have to start from scratch in this project because many feminist analysts of commodity chains have already paved the way. In a 2005 article, I argued that the burgeoning popularity of commodity chain approaches in the 1990s (before most of the aforementioned attempts to standardize and discipline the field) was a response to post-structuralism’s critique of grand theories of development, which faulted the economism, determinism, and Western bias of Marxist and Weberian-influenced “theories of everything.” As a result of taking to heart this critique, many scholars—particularly feminists—were left casting about for ways to do research that addressed social and economic change in what might be called “realist” ways, but that did not seek simple models of causation, did not define everything in terms of its economic value, and did not make Western hegemony seem inevitable. At this juncture, many people saw commodity chain analysis as a way to study what Lourdes Gouveia (1997: 309) called “relatively durable macro-institutional arrangements,” but with more room for contingency, agency, discourse, and culture. Jane Dixon (2002) used commodity chain analysis in this way in her work on chicken; Melanie DuPuis (2002), on milk; Laura Raynolds (2001), on bananas; Harriet Friedmann (1988) on grain and food aid; Priti Ramamurthy (2004), on cotton; Deborah Barndt, (2002) on the tomato; Jane Wills and Angela Hale (2005), on global textiles; Brenda Chalfin (2007), on shea butter; and Nicola Yeates (2009a), on global care chains. I tried to do this in my own research (Collins 2000, 2003) on grapes from northeastern Brazil and on the global garment industry.

Anna Tsing (2009: 149) explains with more precision how the analysis of what she calls value chains permits us to study the local operations of global capital. She suggests that studying such chains allows us to imagine the “bigness” of global capital without losing sight of its heterogeneity because value chains offer a model for “thinking simultaneously about global integration, on the one hand, and the formation of diverse niches, on the other.” Commodity and value chain analyses are valuable research tools in three ways. First, they help us think through how capitalist firms adapt their production and commerce to local conditions and how corporations make use of local inequalities to reduce the costs of labor. Second, they offer a model of global capitalist projects that takes into account their engagement with local economies and cultures. Third, they allow scholars to focus their attention on questions of diversity within structures of power—diversity that is critical not only for capital’s accumulation strategies but also for modes of resistance to capital’s projects.

FEMINIST COMMODITY CHAIN ANALYSIS

What does feminist commodity chain analysis look like? It is not simply tracing the gendered effects of commodity production. As useful as this may be for some purposes, tracking the gender segmentation of the labor force in production or processing nodes and providing gender breakdowns of costs and returns at various points in the chain are not all that a feminist analysis can offer. Rather, as suggested earlier, feminist commodity chain research has the potential to open up the black box of the commodity in several ways, as well as to trace unexpected patterns of global connection.

The first way in which a critical feminist analysis can demystify commodities is by treating waged work, wherever it occurs along the chain, as a complex social relationship rather than as a simple cost. This means documenting not only the labor intensity of the production process, the number of jobs created, and the gender and ethnic composition of the workforce but also the nature of the labor process, the forms of workplace control, and the ways in which the needs of firms for a particular kind of labor at a particular price intersect with local social relations of gender and ethnicity. Wherever a global commodity chain touches down, it intersects with local social relations. As Patricia Fernandez-Kelly (1983: 101) wrote decades ago, when multinational firms employ local workers, they can accentuate and deepen existing gender and ethnic inequalities by harnessing them and enhancing the illusion of their naturalness, or they can contradict prevailing local notions of social order by introducing new divisions of labor and new notions of skill. As Tsing (2009: 150) puts it, “Supply chains don’t merely use preexisting diversity; they also revitalize and create niche segregation. . . . Diversity forms part of the structure of capital rather than an inessential appendage.”

In research on the global apparel industry (Collins 2003), I found that treating labor as a complex social relationship required examining how managers deployed paradoxical discourses of “skill” to map the vulnerability of potential workforces. It entailed listening to workers’ stories about how new waves of global competition affected the pace of their labor and their wage bargain, and it involved observation of new systems of workplace control that achieved world-class quality standards in contexts of sweated labor and high turnover. The ethnographic documentation of these relationships contains an implicit critique of accounts that measure wage cost per unit of production or the “labor efficiency” of operations. It uncovers the active work that global firms do to access pools of low-wage workers and to maximize surplus extraction through intensifying the speed and quality of production. And it reveals the active efforts of workers to gain control over the pace of their work and other labor conditions and over the wage bargains and other deals they strike with the firm.

This kind of analysis is not relevant only to factory work. Feminist commodity chain researchers have been among the few to recognize that services also travel in global circuits. Nicola Yeates (2005a) and Rhacel Parrenas (2001) have investigated the migrant nannies, nurses, and domestics who participate in an international division of social reproductive labor. The commodity of care operates in complex relationships to other commodity chains. As Saskia Sassen (1996) and Pellow and Park (2002) have shown, the intensification of labor in high-end services can generate demand for low-waged service professions. As commodified care work becomes a larger part of the economic pie, the firms that organize its provision seek new strategies to reduce wage costs. The interpersonal labor of care has long been considered place bound and not subject to outsourcing, but recruiting immigrant workers can achieve the same ends by constituting a “deportable” and thus vulnerable workforce. Even low-wage workers in jobs with nonstandard work hours and no sick leave need to purchase care and services that substitute for their labor at home. This creates paradoxes of interest in which both wealthy and poor women depend on keeping wages for care work low (but poor women more so because they receive those low wages themselves). Standard commodity chain analysis has paid little attention to service-sector work, care work, or the complex relationships between manufacturing and service-sector commodities.

The second way in which feminist analysis can open up the black box of the commodity is by making the social reproduction of labor visible. The concept of the social reproduction of labor can be traced to Friedrich Engels (1972: 71), who wrote that material life has a “twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.” Feminists have reworked and elaborated this concept in their attempts to make visible many forms of unmeasured and unpaid domestic work involved in “the propagation of the species.” The concept of social reproductive labor encompasses the activities necessary to keep households and communities functioning and allow them to send productive members out into the world. It includes the activities that reproduce and support individuals from day to day, as well as from year to year and across generations. Although researchers often gloss social reproduction as child care, it also includes care for the ill and the elderly, the work of consumption, cooking, cleaning, paying bills, talking to teachers and doctors, and dealing with landlords, creditors, and banks. It can involve, especially in times of high unemployment and low wages, activities that supplement wages by generating income, such as market gardening or babysitting, or that reduce the cost of living by substituting for purchases, such as gardening for home consumption or making clothes.

Some theorists have emphasized the ways in which these kinds of labor support capital accumulation. In fact, this was one of the contentious claims in the domestic-labor debates of the 1980s. Many voices in that debate argued that households provided unwaged services vital to the reproduction of capitalist workers, allowing employers to lower wage costs by indirectly exploiting the labor of women in the home. They suggested that nuclear families, with their Ozzie and Harriet division of labor, were a structural component of capital (e.g., Fox 1980: 143). In the 1990s, many feminists took issue with this view and emphasized instead the liberatory potential of social reproductive work. For example, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson (1996: 258) complained that “non-capitalist forms of ...