Paulina Ramirez

Making the connections: bringing skill formation into global value chain analysis

The concept of global value chains (GVCs) has been developed to explore the changing nature of the insertion of economies in global production and distribution processes. This literature contributes to the understanding of how globalisation can lead to the upgrading of capabilities of firms and countries as a result of knowledge flows within global networks but does not provide insights into processes of skill formation that to a large degree determine how firms and countries are inser ted into the global economy. The authors argue that perspectives on national social institutional systems need to be incorporated into the analysis of GVCs so that their implications for upgrading and skills development in different economies and nodes of the value chain can be understood, making connections across these discrete areas of debate and analysis, across disciplinary boundaries, and with research conducted in different parts of the world.

Hybrid Corporate Governance and its Effects on Innovation: A Case Study of AstraZeneca

This case study looks at the relationship between the UK/Swedish pharmaceutical firm, AstraZeneca, and its shareholders from the point of view of its effects on innovation. It uses a theoretical framework on corporate governance and innovation that differentiates sectors according to the novelty, visibility and appropriability of technological change. High novelty requires a corporate governance system with strong industry-specific expertise; low visibility requires good firm-specific perceptiveness. High appropriability favours shareholder supremacy as against stakeholder inclusion. The pharmaceutical industry appears to be high in all three, and this (according to accepted stereotypes) should favour the outsider-dominated corporate governance system of the UK as against the insider-dominated Swedish system. It is found that the corporate governance that resulted from the merger could indeed be described as hybrid, but that (following the building up of one major US shareholding) it was a UK/Swedish/US hybrid. In spite of the apparent similarity of the UK and US ‘outsider-dominated’ systems, the US element made a crucial difference, in giving engagement by a strong and well-informed shareholder who had some influence on other shareholders. This in turn helped to protect the firm to a significant extent from short-term pressures within the UK stock market, and thus to allow it to maintain its emphasis on long-term innovation.

The globalisation of research in the pharmaceutical industry: A case of uneven development

Abstract The paper discusses different conceptualisations of the term globalisation of research. From this discussion five dimensions of globalisation of research are identified. Using three different type of data, the paper goes on to examine the extent, motivations and mechanism for the globalisation of research along these five dimensions among leading European and US pharmaceutical multinational companies (MNCs). The evidence for the period 1975–1998 shows that the general process of international expansion of research activities varied significantly between leading US and European MNCs. It is also clear that the development of the process of globalisation has proceeded unevenly along the five dimensions studied. The data also show the increasing concentration of both US and European research investment in the USA.

When should workers embrace or resist new technology

The question of how workers might respond to new technologies has lurked behind many debates on the subject. It has not been posed directly, in part because of concerns about the determinism of asking about the effects of a technology. A preliminary is to set aside these concerns by showing that effects can be identified without determinism. The main argument is that technologies can be assessed on six dimensions: intended or unintended effects; direct and indirect effects; degree of reconstitution in use; immanence; degree of success and degree of discontinuity with the past. These dimensions can then be used to pose questions about any one technology. Three illustrations suggest how such questions can be posed in concrete conditions. Technologies can be challenged so that alternatives to extant systems of work organisation can be considered.

Bringing social institutions into global value chain analysis: the case of salmon farming in Chile

Global value chain (GVC) analysis has been developed to understand the changing nature of global production and distribution processes, but it has not been widely adopted by sociologists to understand the implications of globalization for work, employment and the levers for upgrading labour conditions. To understand the extent to which insertion in GVCs creates opportunities for the upgrading of labour and skills, it is necessary to consider the influence of national institutions, alongside internationally dispersed relationships between companies in different parts of the value chain. By examining the production of farmed salmon in Chile, the article explores the interactions between national institutions for innovation and skills development and locally based producers’ insertion in the global value chain.

Finance, Corporate Governance and the New Techno-Economic Paradigm

Ce papier presuppose, avec Perez (1983, 2002), que le developpement technologique suit un rhythme d’ondes longues, dans lequel les ‘paradigmes techno-economiques’ se succedent a longs intervalles. Le plus recent est celui de l’informatique. Lorsque le nouveau paradigme apparait, une tension se developpe entre celui-ci et le cadre socio-institutionnel existant. Notre argument consiste a montrer que le systeme financier et de gouvernement d’entreprise (FCGS) constitue un element cle de ce cadre, exceptionellement resistant au changement. Notre exemple principal est le FCGS britannique, un systeme ‘boursier’/‘outsider’, que l’on compare aux systemes americains ‘insider’. Sur base d’une etude empirique menee en 1999-2000 et 2005, nous montrons que le Royaume Uni est toujours loin, dans la plupart de l’economie, de voir un nouveau rapprochement creatif entre capital financier et capital industriel qui puisse laisser emerger le potentiel du nouveau paradigme. Nous tracons ensuite un bref apercu de la forme qu’un tel rapprochement pourrait prendre.Classification JEL – O16, O33, P16.

Industry-academic links: a new phase in Ireland’s FDI-led industrialisation strategy

We analyse industry–academic links in the context of a dual economy (or disarticulated industrial structure) in Ireland, as an example of a peripheral territory in the EU. The duality found in the Irish industrial structure is the result of a FDI-led industrialisation strategy which has resulted in two distinct economic sectors – foreign and indigenous, respectively – with weak interactions between the two. Through increased public funding of academic research, the Irish government aimed to attract and embed new waves of higher-value foreign direct investment and increase the dynamism of its indigenous enterprise base. Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, the paper analyses a crucial aspect of Ireland’s recent emphasis on STI policy – industry-academic linkages – and finds that the measures introduced reproduce in the public research system the uneven development found in Ireland’s productive system between indigenous industry and the foreign-owned industrial base.

The Need for an Engaged, Expert and Inclusive British Capitalism

It is a familiar proposition that economies such as Britain and the United States have an advantage in radical innovation and therefore in sectors in which this is relatively important, in general, high-technology ones. Hall and Soskice (2001) call such economies liberal market economies (LMEs), a term which is now too familiar to need definition here; we shall call them shareholder capitalist, following Tylecote and Visintin (2008). Hall and Soskice (HS again, we follow Tylecote and Visintin and call Germany and Japan stakeholder capitalist. This is a rather narrower grouping because it is defined by business co-ordination a la H&S and employee inclusion, which we shall define below.

Innovation and the Information Society

Recent discussions on the need for a new generation of innovation policy point to the need for greater integration between innovation and other policy domains. The challenge is how to establish national systems of policy governance which lead to greater horizontal co-ordination and coherence between innovation and other policy fields.