Florence Palpacuer

Bringing the social context back in: governance and wealth distribution in global commodity chains

Abstract This paper addresses recent changes in governance patterns that significantly altered power relations and wealth distribution in global commodity chains. First, it emphasizes the rise of a financial sphere made up of institutional investors and executives of large corporations at the top of GCCs, and discusses the consequences of this for supplier relations and working conditions of women workers at the base of GCCs. Second, by linking recent governance debates at the level of the firm to issues of governance of the whole chain, it identifies three distinct normative views (shareholder, stakeholder and institutional) of the ways in which the distribution of social welfare can be improved in GCCs. Beyond the shareholder and stakeholder views, a call is made for strengthening an institutional view of GCC governance.

Multinational corporations’ politics and resistance to plant shutdowns: A comparative case study in the south of France

MNCs’ politics has been considered a ‘contested terrain’ and further research is needed into the dynamics between the Head Office’s drastic restructuring decisions and local responses to understand how collective resistance is performed, and on what conditions. A neo-Gramscian approach is developed to analyse two plants in France facing drastic restructuring, including shutdown. We trace the dynamics of forces significant in aligning resisting subjects. We identify two structural processes – chains of equivalence and chains of difference – which were significant to the constitution of resistance. This article contributes to the development and refinement of a neo-Gramscian approach to management and organization studies in general and to multinational corporations’ politics in particular. It refines the study of multinational corporations’ politics by explaining how collective resistance is constituted and organized, what favours and limits the possibility of creating a collective antagonistic front and the role of local managerial resistance.

Globalization and Corporate Governance: Issues for management researchers

Purpose – This paper seeks to highlight the diversity of ideological positions adopted by management researchers in the globalization and corporate governance debate, with the belief that making such positions more explicit should foster confrontation and innovation both in discussions internal to the management research community, and in external contributions to the transformation of business and society.Design/methodology/approach – This paper develops a typology of corporate governance models by distinguishing between a “contractual”, a “moral”, and a “dialectical” view of the corporation.Findings – More management research in an empirical, holistic and trans‐disciplinary approach will be needed if, along a dialectical view of corporate governance, the building of a balance between economic and social forces is a necessary condition for sustaining any given form of capitalism. If such assumption holds true, then management researchers could make a distinctive contribution to the debate on the basis of...

The global sourcing patterns of French clothing retailers

Combining a business-system perspective and a global value-chain perspective, I draw on French clothing import data and interviews to characterize the sourcing patterns of French clothing retailers and analyze their determinants. The dominant pattern identified is one of dispersed, unstable, and informal supplier relations, which can be explained by the importance of small specialized chains, the predominance of family and management ownership, and a low concentration level in French clothing retailing. Since the late 1990s, however, the largest retailers operating in the standard-product segment, some of them engaged in ‘financialization’ strategies, have launched supply-chain rationalization policies aimed at reducing the number of suppliers, stabilizing relations with preferred suppliers, and externalizing manufacturing-related services. A new sourcing model of Anglo-Saxon origin can thus be seen to be diffusing under the combined influence of concentration and financialization in the French clothing retail scene.

Financialization, Globalization and the Management of Skilled Employees: Towards a Market‐Based HRM Model in Large Corporations in France

The article analyses the transformation of HRM policies for skilled employees in large corporations in France over the last decade in relation to changes occurring in governance patterns and competitive strategies. First, we highlight a shift towards globalization and financialization in the strategic management of large corporations in France, entailed by the diffusion of a shareholder form of capitalism in that country. Second, we characterize the market-based HRM model applied to skilled employees under these new strategic orientations and the diversity of ways in which these transformations are perceived depending on employees’ age and level of responsibility within the firm.

Challenging Governance in Global Commodity Chains: The Case of Transnational Activist Campaigns for Better Work Conditions

The coordination or ‘functional integration’ of complementary activities across locations constitutes a distinctive feature of globalization in contemporary capitalism (Dicken 1998). In industries such as apparel, electronics and automobiles, it has led to the emergence of ‘Global Commodity Chains’ (GCCs) governed by large lead firms that retain direct control over marketing and design activities in Northern markets while arranging for the manufacture of their products in complex transnational networks spanning Southern countries. Although mainstream economists continue to think of globalization in terms of international competition, seeing the surge of manufacturing imports in mature markets as resulting from the superior cost advantage of Southern producers, a GCC perspective emphasizes that the globalization of production has been driven primarily by large firms in the North taking advantage of information and communication technologies, transport deregulation, trade liberalization, and an abundant labour supply in the South to reorganize production across countries and world macroregions in order to lower cost, increase flexibility, and build up scale (Gereffi 1994).

La RSE, nouveau terrain pour de nouvelles formes de stratégies politiques

La RSE est-elle une nouvelle maniere pour les entreprises d’influencer le jeu politique ? L’analyse comparative de deux cas issus des industries miniere et automobile nous permet de nourrir l’idee-force selon laquelle la RSE devient un point de passage oblige non seulement pour la recherche d’opportunites marchandes, mais aussi pour les tenants de l’action publique. C’est a la mise au jour des modalites de traduction de la RSE en un carrefour faisant converger des interets economiques et politiques, transformant les interets particuliers des entreprises et des acteurs publics etudies en un universel d’interet general, que s’attache cet article.

Financialization of Global Value Chains and Implications for Local Development

This chapter analyses the ways in which financialization has transformed the territorial and organizational dynamics of innovation in global value chains, by adopting a historical perspective and focusing on Grenoble, the main French cluster in microelectronics R&D. The analysis draws on the geography of domination and neo-Gramscian approaches to (re)problematize spatial and institutional change as a political struggle in global value chains. On the basis of thirty-five interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010, archival information and secondary data, the authors identify three distinct periods in the development of the Grenoble cluster in which the specific geographical boundaries, forms of innovation, and relationship to the local territory in which its activities were embedded differed.