The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Ground Zero in New York City had become a

small marketplace for 9/11 T-shirts and other

mementos, just as shirts bearing the image of

Osama Bin Laden and the falling towers were

selling like hot cakes in Bangkok, Jakarta and

the West Bank as icons of anti-imperialism.

We began with the commodity as a trivial

thing and have ended with a world of com-

modities that ‘actually conceals, instead of dis-

closing, the social character of private labour,

and the social relations between the individual

producers’ (Marx, 1976 [1867], pp. 75–6).

But this hidden history of the commodity

allows us to expose something unimaginably

vast; namely, the dynamics and history of cap-

italism itself. The commodity as its ‘cellular

form’ is surely one of the keys to unlocking the

secrets of what Max Weber (2001 [1904–5])

called the ‘capitalist cosmos’. mw

Suggested reading

Taussig (1978).

commodity chain/fili

‘

ere A collection of

interrelated economic activities and industries

that produce a particular kind of product or

service. While commodity chains connote

‘vertical’ coordination among firms, from

design to assembly to final distribution, the

term seems to have first been used by

Hopkins and Wallerstein in 1977 in a pro-

grammatic call to de-centre thenation-state

in international political economy. Coming

from the perspective of world systems theory

(seecore–periphery model), they argued for

attention to be paid to ‘the widespread com-

modification of processes’ by ‘tak[ing] an

ultimate consumable item and trac[ing] it

back to the set of inputs that culminated in

this item – the prior transformations, the raw

materials, the transportation mechanisms, the

labor input into each of the material processes,

the food inputs into the labor’ (p. 128). The

alternative – and more common – usage of

this concept seems to have independent ori-

gins in French industrial economics. Montfort

and Dutailly (1983) used the termfilie`reto

refer to a set of firms linked vertically in the

creation of a single product. The organiza-

tional structure of an economy is then best

understood and described as a collection of

constituent filie`res, or commodity chains.

This approach has been used ineconomic

geographyto discuss technological and eco-

nomic interdependencies between spatially

proximate buyers and suppliers, as well as

firms linked horizontally in relations of co-

operation. The approach also appears to have

independent origins in agro-food studies (see

agro-food system), representing a rare case

in whichagricultural geographyled the

way in economic geography. Friedland,

Barton and Thomas (1981) first use of the

term ‘commodity systems analysis’ to focus

on the mutual interaction of agricultural pro-

duction practices, grower organization,

labour, science and extension, and marketing

and distribution systems, which was quickly

followed by the actor-oriented variant associ-

ated with Wageningen University to empha-

size how the specificity of farm labour

processes can give rise to different styles of

farming(van der Ploeg, 1985).

For some scholars, the utility of commodity

chains is largely descriptive, a lens through

which to examine industrial organization and/

or economic geography. For instance, the

global commodity chain approach, most asso-

ciated with Gary Gereffi and his colleagues,

focuses on the transnational reach of inter-

firm networks of manufacturers, suppliers

and subcontractors to each other, and to mar-

kets. In respect to the strong coordination role

that apparel design firms started to play in the

1980s, they also suggested an epochal shift

from producer-driven to buyer-driven chains.

Recently, they have posited the existence of

regulation- or consumer-driven commodity

chains, in light of the increased salience of

ethical products and the increasing power of

private systems of regulation to construct and

ensure quality in certain spheres of commodity

production (see Gereffi, Humphrey and

Sturgeon, 2005).

One variation on this approach is value

chain analysis, which draws attention to how

surplus distribution along a given chain is a

function of rent-generating barriers to entry,

which are in turn a function of chain govern-

ance (Kaplinsky, 2004). Kaplinsky and

others have argued that that nationaldevel-

opmentprospects can be improved by indus-

trial ‘upgrading’ to higher value-added

processes.

For another set of scholars, the commodity

chain approach is a tool of radical scholarship,

in that it has the potential to make the work-

ings ofcapitalismmore transparent, particu-

larly becauseglobalizationseems to make

most commodities inscrutable as to how they

are made and distributed (Hartwick, 1998).

Other geographers, notably Leslie and

Reimer (1999), are critical of the notion that

commodities can be ‘unveiled’. Leslie and

Reimer have also remarked that commodity

chains privilegeflowsrelative toscale. jgu

COMMODITY CHAIN/FILI

‘

ERE

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 101 31.3.2009 9:45pm