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Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access originally published online on February 29, 2008
Journal of Economic Geography 2008 8(3):345-367; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbn004
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Global production networks, ethical campaigning, and the embeddedness of responsible governance

Alex Hughes*, Neil Wrigley** and Martin Buttle***

*School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU. email < Alex.Hughes{at}ncl.ac.uk>
**School of Geography, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ.
***Impactt Limited, 33 John's Mews, Holborn, London, WC1N 2NA.

This article presents a theoretically informed consideration of the role of ethical campaigning in shaping organizational practices of power and authority in global production networks (GPNs). It does so through a focus on responsibility, and the ways in which ethical consumption is challenging the organization of global networks of supply. The arguments draw upon and develop two geographical approaches to understanding transnational trade, namely the GPN framework and the study of commodity knowledge. First, understandings of ethical consumption and circuitous commodity knowledge are mobilized to capture the practices of knowledge translation through which ethics are woven into particular forms of supply network coordination. Second, through a comparative case study of UK and US corporate retailers’ ethical trading programmes, notions of embeddedness advanced by the GPN framework are used and further developed to illuminate how the mobilization of ethics into different forms of network coordination involves organizational processes influenced by spaces of retail and consumption. It is argued from this that the influences of retail and consumption should be more fully incorporated into analytical frameworks for understanding GPNs.

Keywords: global production networks, consumption, retail, ethics, corporate responsibility, knowledge,
JEL classifications: F10, F23, J80, L31, L81
Date submitted: 26 September 2007     Date accepted: 12 December 2007


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