Michelle Christian

US-Based Food and Agricultural Value Chains and Their Relevance to Healthy Diets.

This article examines the structure and health implications of two industries, chicken and tomatoes, that play prominent roles in US food and agricultural competitiveness. Both industries have become more concentrated over time, with powerful “lead firms” driving geographical, technological, and marketing changes. Overall, a processed food revolution has taken place in agricultural products that transforms the types of food and dietary options available to consumers. The nature of contemporary food and agricultural value chains affects the strategies and policies that can be effectively employed to address major health goals such as improved nutrition, food safety, and food security.

The Marketing and Distribution of Fast Food

Today childhood obesity is widely recognized as a global health crisis; obesity rates in children have risen dramatically in developed countries since the 1960s and in developing countries since the 1980s. Recent conferences, NGO initiatives, and academic publications testify to increasing awareness of the problem. There is an emerging consensus that the study of childhood obesity should go beyond the medical interventionist model and incorporate multiple levels of analysis. Investigators from diverse social and scientific backgrounds now argue that “obesity should be framed as a complex system in which behavior is affected by multiple individual-level and socioenvironmental factors ( 1 , p. 1),” rather than solely by individual choice.

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.

‘… Latin America without the downside’: racial exceptionalism and global tourism in Costa Rica

Abstract In this paper I address how the ideology of Costa Rican exceptionalism and whiteness has maintained racial inequality with the growth of global tourism. Whereas scholars of whiteness in Latin America typically ignore how the ideology has supported racial inequality in structural forms, I explore how discursive racial discourses influence how structural inequality practices in the tourism industry take form. I examine the narratives and symbols from public and private Costa Rican tourism actors who use Costa Ricas racial ideology of exceptionalism and whiteness to position the nations cultural wealth. Two narratives to define Costa Rica are promoted: (1) environmental uniqueness; and (2) rural democracy traditions. These narratives support white inclusionary and black exclusionary practices in tourism economic activity. Because Costa Rica is perceived as ‘white’ and represents a ‘white habitus’, it distinguishes itself as a ‘democratic’ and ‘safe’ place to visit, while negatively racialized Afro-Costa Rican locations in the southern Atlantic coast are framed as ‘dangerous’ or ‘different’ and non-representative of the exceptional characteristics.

Economic and Social Up(Down)Grading in Tourism Global Production Networks: Findings from Kenya and Uganda

Abstract This paper presents preliminary field research findings on tourism global production networks (GPNs) in Kenya and Uganda. It addresses the questions of whether economic upgrading in the tourism global production network leads to social upgrading for workers, small producers and community members in tourism localities, and what conditions support it. It further examines whether the relationship is different in mass vs. community-based tourism. The paper finds that: social upgrading outcomes can follow economic upgrading, but typically only for certain groups of workers; practically all firms use multi-labour strategies and make independent decisions on strengthening labour protection and standards; ‘mass’ tourism subsectors are more likely to lead to social upgrading than small-scale, community ethnic tourism; and there are acute racial, ethnic and gender divisions between firm ownership, job placement, and sub-segments in the GPN.

Tourism Overview: Changing End Markets and Hyper Competition

Abstract This overview of tourism research conducted by Capturing the Gains covers cases from Asia (China, Indonesia and India), and Africa (Kenya, South Africa and Uganda). The tourism value chain is outlined and changes in the relative roles of different agencies discussed. The paper analyses the changes in the composition of tourists in these countries and the resultant change in relative importance of national and international tour agencies. Our findings suggest that benefits from the growth of tourism are unevenly distributed, with the oligopolistic nature of the tour agencies and hyper-competition among service providers even resulting in some cases of below-cost provision of destination services. These commercial value chain dynamics have led to precarious employment arrangements. There is a synthesis of the nature of employment in tourism, with a large presence of own-account and other forms of informal employment. Ways of dealing with the oligopolistic buyers’ market are discussed, including branding and organization by destination service providers. Methods of improving the gains of women and other workers are also addressed, such as the role of workers’ organization and state-supported social security measures.

Tourism Global Production Networks

Capturing the Gains seeks to understand the structure of the tourism global production network (GPN) in order to uncover avenues where firms and workers in poor countries can economically and socially upgrade. This briefing note highlights the stages of the tourism GPN, avenues of economic upgrading, and the broad labor themes of the sector. Several research questions are posited to situate the challenges and opportunities involved for sustainable tourism development and Decent Work opportunities through global tourism growth in the global South.

Transnational intersectionality and domestic work: The production of Ugandan intersectional racialized and gendered domestic worker regimes:

Domestic work has evolved and adapted in the global South in distinctive racialized and gendered forms as a result of neoliberal economic restructuring. With the case of Uganda, this article applies a transnational intersectionality framework to neoliberal economic restructuring to identify how domestic worker regimes are produced. A transnational intersectionality approach spotlights the translocation of diverse Ugandan domestic workers embedded within the structural forces of economic organization, reproductive labor, state policies, and geography. Drawing from extensive fieldwork from three regions of Uganda, the study’s two main findings document: (1) the production of an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime as a consequence of the Ugandan aid state; and (2) the production of an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime supported by the weakening and underfunding of social development policies in the Ugandan national budget. These regimes show how race, gender, and regional demarcations of domestic work intersect in distinct forms connected to restructuring. A transnational intersectionality approach exposes the diversity of patterns in reproductive labor in Uganda.

Racial Neoliberalism in Costa Rican Tourism: Blanqueamiento in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract Purpose This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices. Methodology/approach Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality. Findings Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines. Practical implications An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly. Originality/value As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.

A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness

Twenty years after Bonilla-Silva developed the analytic components of a structural race perspective and called for “comparative work on racialization in various societies,” U.S.-centric race theory continues to be mostly rooted in a U.S. focus. What is missing is a framework that explores race and racism as a modern global project that takes shape differently in diverse structural and ideological forms across all geographies but is based in global white supremacy. Drawing from Bonilla-Silva’s national racialized social systems approach, global South scholars, and critical race scholars in the world-systems tradition, the author advances a global critical race and racism framework that highlights two main areas: (1) core components that include the “state,” “economy,” “institutions,” and “discourses” and “representations,” as divided by “racist structure” and “racist ideology” and shaped by the “history” of and current forms of transnational racialization and contemporary “global” linkages, and (2) the production of deep and malleable global whiteness. With this framework, both the permanence and flexibility of racism across the globe can be seen, in all its overt, invisible, and insidious forms, that ultimately sustains global white supremacy in the twenty-first century.