Stephanie Barrientos,Gender and Work in Global Value Chains – Capturing the Gains?

Reviewed by: Peter Lund-Thomsen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

This new publication by Stephanie Barrientos reflects the pinnacle of her work as an academic throughout a career which spans more than three decades dedicated to studying the role of labour in global value chains. Barrientos first became well known for her studies of the gendered nature of global value chains and ethical trade in the 1990s and early 2000s (Barrientos et al., 2003). She then went on to produce a highly cited study on the impacts of the UK Ethical Trading Initiative’s code of conduct on workers’ conditions in several countries that was published in 2006/2007 (Barrientos and Smith, 2006, 2007). Between 2008 and 2012, she pioneered a large global study, ‘Capturing the Gains’, involving various researchers in different regions of the world that looked at the linkages between economic and social upgrading in global value chains (Barrientos et al., 2011).

Barrientos’ new book, Gender and work in global value chains – capturing the gains?, aims at nuancing the mixed and evolving gendered outcomes ‘in the different nodes of value chains and to identify channels for leveraging improvements that would enable all women workers to capture more of the gains’ (Barrientos, 2019: 8). The core research question Barrientos sets out to answer is about how global retail value chains are shaping gendered patterns of work, and what the gendered outcomes are for workers. Theoretically, her book seeks to contribute new knowledge that analyses how retail value chains are socially embedded, and how gendered boundaries are shifting between the spheres of commercial production and social reproduction. Empirically, the book sets out to provide new insights into the retail shifts that have taken place since the 1990s, and how these shifts have affected gendered patterns of work in both the global North and the global South.

What I find particularly interesting about her new book is that Barrientos goes beyond many of her earlier writings on global value chain and gendered social upgrading which have been highly empirically oriented (see for instance, Barrientos, 2001, 2014; Barrientos et al., 2019). In fact, her book introduces a broader, more structured analytical framework that can help inform future work in this area. Her analytical framework draws upon global value chain and global production network analyses, feminist political economy and labour studies, resulting in what Barrientos calls a global reproduction networks approach (see also Kelly, 2009). This approach seeks to analyse the societal embeddedness of retail value chains, considering the shifting gendered boundaries between the economic sphere of commercial production and the societal sphere of social reproduction. It does so by looking at three different dimensions: first, embedded tensions related to speed and quality versus speed of delivery; second, gendered approaches to articulating work relations that result from the societal undervaluation of work carried out by women in ways that influence value creation, enhancement and capture and third, the contested nature of outcomes for workers that have been shaped by different forms of labour agency and civil society activism.

I see part of the added value of the book as relating to this analytical framework. The introduction of the notions of embedded tensions within retailer sourcing practices is helpful to future GVC analysis and gendered articulations as the expansion of retailing commercializes many household activities. And the idea of contested outcomes is also very welcome, as it highlights that gendered social upgrading/downgrading trajectories are not necessarily pre-determined. On the contrary, contestation of these processes are very much possible – both by women workers themselves and also by civil society organizations and trade unions.

In empirical terms, Barrientos begins her book by describing what she terms the mantra of cost, quality and speed of delivery that drive buyer–supplier relationships in global value chains, and how international retailers attempt to govern their value chains through the use of private standards. She then explicates how retail value chains have been associated with different gendered patterns of work in low-, middle and high-income countries. She pays particular attention to how ‘work’ is defined and articulates how the gendered division of productive and reproductive work is shaped by different forms of paid work in global value chains. She furthermore considers how the changing gendered profile of flexible forms of work link temporary, casual, smallholder and home-based workers in ways that allow local producers to navigate buyer pressures related to cost-cutting, quality requirements and speed of delivery in a context of widespread outsourcing and the use of subcontractors. The way in which Barrientos analyses these global trends is highly relevant, as this enables readers to understand how these pressures play out in diverse geographical contexts around the world. Hence, we get a good sense of how ‘global’ economic forces will interact with and affect ‘local’ gendered labour markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The empirical value of the book also lies in its richness and diversity of case studies of economic and social upgrading/downgrading undertaken on three continents and throughout various time periods. It is rare that a book is capable of drawing upon such a wealth of first-hand observations and triangulated with empirical data in a clearly articulated way. For instance, Barrientos investigates a low-road trajectory of how traditional agricultural exports involving smallholder farmers have been integrated into agro-food value chains dominated by international retailers in an industry – cocoa production – that has undergone significant shifts since the 1980s. Here, she pays attention to the complexities of gender articulations in relation to the often ‘hidden work’ undertaken by women in cocoa production, highlighting that many multinational companies are now involved in economic and social upgrading projects, often involving this gendered dimension, with a view to continuing the future supply of cocoa in an industry context where demand is soon expected to exceed supply. Furthermore, she analyses cases where more mixed economic and social upgrading outcomes can be observed. For instance, she draws on examples from South African and Ghanaian agriculture as well as apparel production in India and Bangladesh that illustrate how different gendered economic and social upgrading/downgrading trajectories have affected various groups of workers and smallholders quite differently.

At the end of the book, the highlights of the lessons learned from the various case studies are very useful. These are combined with insights into the failure of global value chain governance to bring about desired improvements in economic and social upgrading, in particular, for women. She emphasizes the need for combining three dimensions of governance: public, private and social in securing the gains that women workers obtain from their participation in retailer-led global value chains. She also reflects on the future opportunities and challenges for social upgrading of women workers in changing global, retailer-driven value chains.

There are only a few theoretical issues which appear to be left unconsidered in relation to women workers and social upgrading/downgrading in this very comprehensive new work. Barrientos refers a number of times, particularly in chapter 4, to ‘feminist political economy’. However, we are told very little about the diversity of approaches that are contained under the broad heading of ‘feminist political economy’. For instance, although she does not directly refer to ‘feminist political economy’ in her (2011) article, Ruwanpura argues that it is possible to identify three decades of feminist thinking on the role of women workers in the global apparel industry. She traces these developments as relating to a transition from an economic focus to a cultural one alongside more strident calls for corporate codes of conduct to address the gendered nature of labour rights violations. Hence, in future work, I hope that Barrientos will further unpack the notion of ‘feminist political economy’ and its implications for social upgrading/downgrading in global value chains.

An issue which is less directly touched upon in Barrientos’ book is the role of local production organization in driving social upgrading/downgrading processes amongst women workers. Most of the focus is still – understandably – on how the global organization of transnational interfirm networks drive economic and social upgrading/downgrading processes in particular local economic contexts. However, there is a dire need to understand how local production organization – for instance in local industrial clusters, drive economic and social upgrading/downgrading processes in their own right without their influence necessarily being related to their ties into global value chains (Gulati et al., 2018; Lund-Thomsen et al., 2016). For instance, this could take the form of joint action initiatives in industrial clusters where business associations work together with state agencies, NGOs, trade unions and international development agencies to promote social upgrading of women workers in local economic settings (UNIDO, 2018).

Finally, her new book does not touch on the links between the gendered nature of social and environmental upgrading/downgrading processes (see, for instance, Krishnan, 2018). Clearly, investigating the linkages between the commercial sphere of work and social sphere of reproduction as well as the embeddedness of women workers in communities affected by environmental pollution/climate change processes is a worthwhile cause (see for instance, Tanyanyiwa and Mufunda, 2020). To date, we know little about how the reorganization of global value chains affects the sites at which pollution is emitted into the environment and the extent to which this particularly disadvantages women – both as workers and also as actors that take on a main role in not only protecting their households but also the natural environment.

In spite of these caveats, Barrientos has written a ground-breaking book that will inform research on women workers in the global economy in the decades to follow. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in international political economy, global value chain research and social justice concerns in the global South more generally.