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Articulations of Capital
Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations

Articulations of Capital is an intellectually refreshing and stimulating analysis of the shifts in the global apparel industry and its regional and local manifestations in East-Central Europe. Pickles and Smith excel in a theoretically and conceptually rich but empirically grounded critical approach that challenges some widely held assumptions about the contemporary apparel industry, postsocialism and East-Central Europe.’
Petr Pavlínek, Professor of Geography, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

‘This book presents a well grounded and historically contextualized analysis of the political economy of regional transformation in a changing world of apparel global production networks. I particularly like its focus on “actually existing transitions” in selected East Central European regional economies. In this way, the authors have eschewed the snapshot approach in most studies of inter-firm industrial governance and shed much better empirical light on the critical issue of industrial upgrading.’
— Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Professor of Economic Geography and Co-Director of the GPN@NUS Centre, National University of Singapore

John Pickles (Author), Adrian Smith (Author), Robert Begg (With), Milan Bucek (With), Poli Roukova (With), Rudolf Pástor (With)

9781118632710, Wiley

Hardback, published 22 January 2016

320 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.59 kg

Articulations of Capital offers an accessible, grounded, yet theoretically-sophisticated account of the geographies of global production networks, value chains, and regional development in post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe.

  • Proposes a new theorization of global value chains as part of a conjunctural economic geography
  • Develops a set of conceptual and theoretical arguments concerning the regional embeddedness of global production
  • Draws on longitudinal empirical research from over 20 years in the Bulgarian and Slovakian apparel industries
  • Makes a major intervention into the debate over the economic geographies of European integration and EU enlargement

Series Editors’ Preface vii

List of Figures viii

List of Tables xi

Preface and Acknowledgements xii

Abbreviations xxi

Part One Articulating Capital in Global Production Networks 1

1 Articulations of Capital 3

2 Economic Geography, Conjuncture and the Dynamics of Capital 23

Part Two Working off the Past: Context and Complexity in Apparel Global Production Networks 53

3 Working in the Post‐Socialist Apparel Economy 55

4 Managing Europe’s Golden Bands: Trade Policy and the Regulation of Production Networks (with Robert Begg) 86

5 Transformations, Legacies and Networks: The State and Market Globalizations (with Robert Begg and Milan Bucě k) 104

Part Three Industrial Dynamics, Regionalization and the Conjunctural Economy of Global Production Networks 135

6 Theorizing Transition and the Dynamics of Capital: The Diverse Trajectories of Post‐socialist Firms (with
Robert Begg, Milan Buček, Poli Roukova, and Rudolf Pastor) 137

7 Border Reconfigurations and the Frontiers of Capital (with Robert Begg, Milan Buček, and Rudolf Pastor) 162

8 Regionalization and the Palimpsests of Production: Delocalization, Legacies and Firm Differentiation (with Robert Begg and Poli Roukova) 182

9 The Cultural Economies of Post‐Socialism: Ethnicity, Garage Firms and Regional Markets (with Robert Begg and Poli Roukova) 214

Part Four Conclusion 237

10 Conclusion 239

Appendix 1 Firm-level Restructuring in the Slovak Textiles and Clothing Sector, 2004–2013 253

Appendix 2 Key to Figure 9.14 Dimitrovgrad Market, 2011 257

References 260

Index 281

Subject Areas: Geography [RG]

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