Analysing the organization of global production: thoughts from the periphery

FERNÁNDEZ, VÍCTOR RAMIRO; BRONDINO, GABRIEL

The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics

Routledge

Año: 2017; p. 32 - 48

By the end of the 1970s the ?golden age? of capitalism that started in the post-World War II years came to an end. The institutional arrangements that sustained a strong process of capital accumulation had now, in principle, become a straitjacket to continue its expansion. A period of considerable institutional and productive transformations then began which scholars are still trying to understand. One of the most important dimensions of this transformation is related to changes in the global organization of production. It has been evidenced a restructuring of supply chains in multiple locations with multiple firms operating in a highly coordinated way through market exchanges. This stands in sharp contrast to the vertically integrated conglomerates distinctive of the ?Fordist? mode of accumulation.How these changes emerged and what are their theoretical and practical implications are still an open field of discussion among scholars. The central variable in most explanation is technological change. For new institutional economics, changes in technology creates new rents for potential innovators that demand for institutional rearrangements. In this sense, the technological shifts of the 1970s/1980s opened up attractive rent opportunities that could only be seized only by breaking down the vertically integrated corporations (Langlois 2003). A similar position, though in a neo-Schumpeterian vain, is held by Perez (1985).Although we do not deny the importance of these elements, we believe that they come up short in a comprehensive explanation on the complexity of the aspects involved in the development of the changes. In this sense, it is legitimate to ask to what extent one can explain these transformations by abstracting them from other transformations that have occurred within the capitalist system in the advent of the 1970s? world crisis, in terms of class struggle, states? policy priorities, and geopolitics. It is also relevant to investigate the particular role that these changes have had on the periphery of the capitalist system and the way in which this periphery is involved in the ?spatial solution? of capitalism in general and in the global productive transformations in particular.We will attempt to provide a theoretical framework to analyze these changes in the context of recent historical transformations of the capitalist system, as well as to evaluate the particular way in which the periphery was incorporated into these transformations.