Mapping networks: labor, space, and globalization

Mapping networks: labor, space, and globalization
Andrew Herod
Department of Geography
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
I start off with two premises
1. Globalization is a spatial process
2. GPNs are networks of embodied labor
 this labor is embedded in places and embroiled in spatial linkages which shape the possibilities for its action
Outline
1) globalization as a geographical process
2) globalization as spatial rescaling –
geographical imaginary shapes what we think is possible in terms of praxis
3) GPNs as networks of embodied labor which is geographically situated
4) Two brief examples of labor organizing across GPNs
Part 1: Globalization is a geographical process
• Revolutions in transportation and telecommunications technology continue to transform the spatial and temporal organization of capitalism
• These are changing the spatial links between places and workers
 Time‐space compression (David Harvey)
 The Annihilation of Space by Time (Marx)
• “Death of Distance” (Frances Cairncross)
• “The World is Flat” (Thomas Friedman)
• “Borderless World” (Kenichi Ohmae)
The Incredible Shrinking World
Few places are now more than 24/ 48 hrs apart
Guangzhou & Manila can be considered manufacturing suburbs of NY, London, & Göttingen
Erasure of geographical distance; greater competition for some workers
Time‐space compression is historically and geographically uneven
Cost per minute of calling from the US to the rest of the world, based on MCI peak rates, June 1994
Cost per minute of calling from the US to the rest of the world, based on MCI peak rates, July 1998
How do we think of space?
• Space can be “bent”, reshaped (“shrinking of distance”); it is malleable
• Space is “socially constructed”
• Space is “dynamic”, like history; it is subject to manipulation by political forces
• Thinking of distance in relative terms (eg time) rather than absolute terms (kilometers) changes what we consider to be “near” and “far” & so changes our understanding of the spatiality of capitalism
There are two principal ways in which globalization has been imagined
1) The “Geography no longer matters” perspective
In a world of instantaneous communication and ease of travel, geography is no longer important; everywhere is reachable very quickly
Kenichi Ohmae (2005) The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World
“In the age of the global economy, physical location is much less important [than previously and it] no longer matters where a company is based…The world is one huge arena for economic activity, no longer compartmentalized by barriers”
In the neoliberal globalization discourse, capital can overcome space but workers are confined to place
2) The “In a shrinking globe, geography becomes more
important” perspective
Firms with the capacity of locating their operations almost anywhere are more discriminating in choosing between specific places.
“As spatial barriers diminish so we become much more sensitized to what the world’s spaces contain.” (Harvey [1989: 294] The Condition of Postmodernity)
The glocalization of TNCs’ investment strategies
Part 2: Globalization and the geographical rescaling of work life
Globalization has often been represented as bringing about the “delocalization” (Virilio 1997; Gray 1998) and/or “denationalization” (Sassen 2003) of social life
Discourse that labor relations are being “rescaled”
 bargaining is being “decentralized”/ “localized”
 labor must become “globalized”
Discourses of Scale
Metaphors shape how we engage with the world
Two dominant representations of spatial scales
1) Scales as areal – discrete entities (“space envelopes”)
a) as rungs on a ladder
b) as concentric circles
c) as Matryoshka dolls
2) Scales as networked
a) earthwork burrows
b) tree roots
c) spider web
The Ladder Metaphor
• Scales are discrete arenas of action
• One climbs up from the local or down from the global; the global is “above” the local
• The global is not necessarily “bigger” than other scales
The Circle Metaphor
• Scales are discrete arenas of action
• One moves out from the local to the global; the global encompasses all other scales
• The global is the “biggest” scale but is not necessarily “above” others
The Matryoshka Doll Metaphor
• Scales are discrete arenas of action
• Highly nested – scales can only be ordered in a particular progression
Scales as networked
Bruno Latour:  the world’s complexity cannot be captured by “notions of levels, layers, territories, [and] spheres”  Rather than seeing the world as made up of hierarchically ordered areal entities [“space envelopes”], Latour maintained that we need to think of it as “fibrous, thread‐like, wiry, stringy, ropy, [and] capillary.”  the local and the global “offer points of view on networks that are by nature neither local or global, but are more or less long and more or less connected” The Earthwork Burrow Metaphor
• Scales are not thought of in areal terms
• Where one scale ends and the other begins is
harder to determine
• What would it mean to talk of a “larger” scale or
scales as “encompassing” others?
The Tree Root Metaphor
Local
Regional
National
Global
• Scales go “deeper” or are “more shallow”
The Spider’s Web Metaphor
• Linkages are longer or shorter
Materially, scales are socially produced through struggle
Scales of social organization are struggled over:
“going global”/ “going local” is an active process
Developing “national” strategies is an active process
Questions Raised
What does it mean to say that something is a “local” economic or political process rather than a “national” one, and how are they related/connected? Do we imagine that “local” and “national” processes operate in separate geographical realms or are they much less easily separated geographically, such that the “local” blends into the “national” and vice versa? What does it mean to say that workers have rescaled their activities so as to challenge their employer? How do workers imagine that they are connected to workers elsewhere and what does this mean for how they go about organizing?  in terms of the relationship between the local and the global or national, do they see the latter as: “above” it?; “beyond” it?; “containing” it??
 This will likely affect how they engage in political praxis.  Given the rhetorical power that being above someone else has assumed in Western thinking (being at the top of a hierarchy is usually considered more powerful than being at its bottom) thinking in such terms is likely to evoke one kind of political praxis. Thinking in horizontal circle terms is likely to evoke a very different kind.
 how does viewing multinational firms as “multilocal” rather than “global” shape what’s considered “possible”?
 how scales are seen to be connected can play an important role in framing situations, which can affect political praxis.  if scales like the local and the national are seen in ladder terms, then management might seek to represent a workplace deunionization drive as a local event which “higher up” “national” actors (perhaps a union’s headquarters in the national capital) should “stay out of”.  if scales are imagined in areal terms, this can have implications for how narratives of inclusion/exclusion might be articulated by employers opposed to unions developing cross‐border linkages
Summary of the argument so far
1) globalization is a geographical process
2) globalization is seen to involve the rescaling of social life
3) how we think about how the geographical scales of social life are structured is important for thinking about how workers are connected, power relations, and the structure of corporations
Part 3: Global Production Networks as Geographically Embedded Entities
GPNs are networks of embodied labour, which is itself embedded in spatial linkages
Typically, firms and workers at the “bottom” of the commodity chain hierarchy are imagined to be weak
GPN nodes are found in particular places
 Places are not simply inert arenas or boxes in which working life is played out  they are actively and continuously remade locations where local and non‐local systems of rules, norms, customs, legal structures and regulatory mechanisms intersect to shape and institutionalize the behavior of workers and employers
 From such a perspective the trajectory of a place’s development is a dynamic outcome of the complex interaction between its territorialized internal social relations and how it is linked with other places through GPNs. • Within such a view GPNs are seen to act as global pipelines between locally based firms or clusters of firms within regions and selected partners outside the region. • The world economy therefore consists of tangled webs of production circuits and networks, with TNCs playing a key role in coordinating these networks.
So how do local community institutions shape GPNs? – through strategic coupling
3 geographical processes are involved (Yeung [2009])  Layering – the process whereby successive rounds of investment are made within particular regions
 Conversion – involves a change in the nature of the relationship between the region, its assets and GPNs
 and/or recombination – region’s assets are being linked to new waves of investment, which itself can involve decoupling in other regions (a TNC may abandon one community to locate in another, thereby connecting this new community to its broader corporate network).
All 3 of these link the places in which the nodes of the chain are found with places located beyond them.
Much analysis has focused upon the actions of TNCs as the creators of commodity chains
BUT, place‐based institutions (including labor) are central in all of this because they distinctively shape how strategic coupling occurs through their moulding of local & non‐local assets to fit the needs of GPNs
These institutions and their capacities vary considerably across space due to the particularities of local histories. They shape the structure of the GPN
• This provides a means for thinking about how workers in 2nd and 3rd‐tier firms shape the network
• Typically these firms & their workers are seen as weak; but because nodes are agglomerations of spatially embedded workers connected across space, their actions can be transmitted throughout the GPN to places hundreds or thousands of kilometres away
• Exemplified by the Japanese tsunami and Toyota
• This raises the question of how workers are connected together across space and how their spatial location shapes their praxis. • And how do workers shape the places in which GPN nodes are found and the space of capitalism across which they connect different parts of the network?
So, how does space shape political praxis?
1) Issues of spatial embeddedness/ entrapment
Cox and Mair: Idea of ‘locality dependence’
 Certain relationships (economic, political, cultural, familial) aren’t reproducible elsewhere; certain forms of capital and certain groups of workers, together with the state, are dependent upon particular configurations of relationships that are only available in particular places – impact upon local politics (e.g. boosterism)
2) Social actors must engage with the unevenly developed geography of capitalism
 The practice of labor solidarity is an inherently geographical one: it is a process of workers “coming together…over space” (Southall 1988)
 Workers need to overcome the “friction of distance”
 Capital can use spatial distance to “fetishise commodities”
 In the case of contract bargaining, national contracts can be viewed as “spatial averages”
3) Changing Spatial Relationships and Worker Identity
Hyman: “the spatial location and social organization of work, residence, consumption and sociability have become highly differentiated,” such that the average employee today “may live a considerable distance from fellow‐workers, possess a largely ‘privatized’ domestic life or a circle of friends unconnected with work, and pursue cultural or recreational interests quite different from those of other employees in the same workplace.”
The spatial “disjuncture between work and community (or indeed the destruction of community in much of its traditional meaning) entails the loss of many of the localized networks which strengthened the supports of union membership (and in some cases made the local union almost a ‘total institution’).”
Whereas formerly many workers’ “institutionalized solidarities were reinforced by the broader networks of everyday life…the possibility and character of collectivism are today very different when work and everyday life are increasingly [spatially] differentiated.”
The spatial connections between home & work or between different work sites can shape how workers build connections with one another
4) Space and the Worker’s lifeworld
Workers are constrained in time and in space – idea of “time‐
space paths”
Sometimes individuals’ space‐time paths cross to form “interactive bundles” (i.e., are they in the same place at the same time) whereas on other occasions they remain separate (i.e., people may occupy the same spaces but at different times, or are in different places at the same time). Many women workers have much greater domestic responsibilities than do their husbands and so lead lives that are more closely tied spatially to the home and to their children’s routines than are men’s.
Summary of the argument so far
• GPNs are networks of embodied labor
• This embodied labor is embedded in particular places which are connected across space
• What goes on in the particular places and how they are connected across space is shaped by the actions of workers and shapes the possibility of worker praxis
Part 4: two examples of mapping networks so as to intervene in them
1) International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas (IRNAA), a group of critical scholars working on labor issues in the industry attempted to map such links as part of a broader project –
the “Mapping Supplier Chains” project
Steve Babson & Huberto Juarez (2007) “Emergent Design: The International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas.” Labor Studies Journal
32.1: 23‐40
The network sees as one of its primary tasks to map “the changing contours of this supply chain, from vehicle assembly plants, to in‐house suppliers of major components including drive trains, to outside suppliers responsible for the manufacture of integrated systems, to commodity suppliers and job shops contracted to deliver parts and small components to other plants in the chain.”
Key is to determine the connections between different nodes in the networks so as to identify weaknesses
2) GM‐UAW 1998 dispute
Andrew Herod (2000) “Implications of Just‐
in‐Time production for union strategy: Lessons from the 1998 General Motors‐
United Auto Workers dispute.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90.3: 521‐547.
June 5, 1998 3,400 members of UAW Local 659 walked off the job in a Flint, Michigan, metal fabricating plant
June 11, 1998 5,800 members of UAW Local 651 struck a Delphi Automotive Systems plant in Flint.
Within one week, 71 plants in the GM/ Delphi network had been affected (39 in Mexico, 2 in Canada)
Second week: 48 plants affected (3 in Mexico, 3 in Canada, 1 in Singapore).
At its height, the dispute caused 193,517 GM/ Delphi workers to be laid off.
GM lost after tax $1.2 billion in 3rd quarter of 1998; its US vehicle sales in July 1998 were 38% below July 1997.

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