Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism.

by Gary Gereffi; Miguel Korzeniewicz

Review by: J. Timmons Roberts
Social Forces, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Mar., 1995), pp. 1170-1171
Published by: Oxford University Press
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1170 / Social Forces 73:3, March 1995

internationalismwere victims of capitalist expediency. Legendary black Cubans

(Carlotaand Maceo) were used to justify loss of Cuban life in Angola, but such
ploys failed to camouflage Cuba's apparent embrace of capitalist practices.These
market relations reintroduced into the Cuban society the familiar labor shortages,
competition,class conflict,graftand corruption- a far cry from the early Guevarian
call for "one, two, many Vietnams."
In the final chapter, the author draws together the main elements of her
revisionist theses. In it she points to the secondaryand beleagueredrole of Marxism-
Leninism Her main contributionis, clearly,to present the peculiarCubanexperience
to be blended with a growing body of scholarshipcast in the revisionist vein.
This is, altogether, a fine book. The canons of scholarship it professes and
employs are impressive. Its data sources - quantitativeand qualitative -are rich,
with the former neatly presented in carefully presented tables in the appendixes.
This book is indispensable to any serious scholarshipof the Cuban experiment.

Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism.

Editedby GaryGereffiand Miguel Korzeniewicz. Praeger,1994. 334 pp. Cloth, $59.95;
paper, $22.95. (Hard cover edition is available from Greenwood Press.)

Reviewer:J TIMMONSROBERIT,TulaneUniversity

Factoryclosings in wealthy "core"nations and their flight to countrieswith cheaper

labor have signaled to workers, owners, politicians, and social scientists.that the
global economy is rapidly changing. Effectiveresponses requirea cohesive, broader
vision of these changes. Decades of debate in sociology over modernization,
dependency, and world-systems theories attempted to explain these processes and
why some regions and countries "developed"economicallywhile others stagnated.
Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz's edited volume shows that stereotypic
portrayalsof that debate as ending with the broad regional generalizationsof the
1970s and early 1980s are fatally mistaken.
CommodityChainsand GlobalCapitalismis a majorcontributionto development
theory and to our understandingof the new global economy. The result of an April
1992 conferenceof the Political Economyof the WorldSystem (PEWS)section of the
American Sociological Association, the book brings together 27 authors in 15
chapters. Each chapter attempts to use the "global commodity chains" (GCC)
approach, most following one type of product from its design and raw materials
supplier "nodes" through its processing and manufacturing to its transportand
finally to its retailing. Put simply, the approachexamines what is produced where,
why that location was chosen, and who benefits most from production in that
location.To understandwhy chains are set up as they are, it is necessary to examine
not only relations of production and state tax and tariffpolicies, but also interfirm
relations of contracting out and purchasing, distribution, and marketing. The
approach shows that the levels of profit and salaries in any link in the chain are
constantly shifting and depend on the product and how the chain is currently
organized.
There are six provocative synthetic chapters,while the remainderprovide case
studies of single types of commodity chains: garments, footwear, fresh fruits,
cocaine, automobiles, grain, and ships. Some general findings emerge from
comparing these chains. First, chains driven by big buyers (like Nike or WalMart)

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 Book Reviews / 1171

tend to have many small producing companies spread in cheap labor locations
around the world who do little product design and gain relatively little of the
overall product's value. On the other hand, producers of capital-intensiveproducts
such as automobiles, aircraft, and semiconductors create vertically organized
corporationsthat design, produce, and market the product. Because they need to be
near centers of innovation and supply efficiency, these types of production facilities
have tended to migrate far less, instead clustering in a few regions.
The volume reveals the largely neglected common task of geographers and
sociologists in examining the shifting world economy. Some authors include
geographic analysis, but sociological techniques and theory are still relatively
underdeveloped.
From my view the volume has two significant flaws. First,it makes little effort
throughout to bring readers who are not familiar with the current lingo and
conceptual debates up to speed. For this reason I would hesitate to use the volume
in the classroom except with students who have been familiarizedwith theories of
development through post-Fordism. Second, unlike Gereffi's previous edited
volume, this volume lacks a strong introductorychapter and a summary chapter.
Some points become repetitive and the volume would have benefitted from better
coordinationand division of labor.
In spite of these limitations, this volume will become an importantlink in the
improved understanding by social scientists of how macrostructureslike the world
economy depend upon and influence gender relations, household structures,
ethnicity, labor control, state policies, and regional geography.

Max Weber's Sociology of Intellectuals.

By AhmadSadri.Forewordby ArthurJ. Vidich.OxfordUniversity Press, 1992. 167 pp.
Cloth, $32.50;paper, $12.95.

Reviewer: FRnZRINGER University of Pittsburgh

This is an ambitious essay of some 140 pages, including five appendixes. About
one-third of it is devoted to Max Weber's methodological writings; the rest to a
sociology of intellectuals that starts from Weber,but moves on ratherquickly to the
author's own classificationsand theories.Though rich in suggestions and broad in
scope, the book is not free of faults. Likesome other English-speakingauthors,Sadri
draws exclusively upon those of Weber'sworks that are translatedinto English;but
historians are rightly uncomfortablewith this limitation.In any case, some of what
Sadri writes about Weber's account of the cultural and social sciences seems less
than solidly anchored in the relevant sources (including Weber'scritiqueof Eduard
Meyer, whom Sadri consistently names Mayer).The result is an occasional lack of
clarity in an admittedly difficult and controversialfield.
Thus Weberdid not, as Sadri claims, "dismiss actual existing meaning from the
realm of sociological interest";in fact, he criticized Simmel for neglecting an agent's
actually intended meaning, and he referred explicitly to "known subjective
attitudes" in a passage cited by Sadri himself. He did try to exclude mere empathy
and the agent's own testimony as privileged sources of our knowledge about
motives and beliefs. Elsewhere, Sadri seems to confound interpretive hypotheses
with ideal types; the former must be verified, the latter play a heuristic role that
requires further clarification. More generally, Sadri gives too little attention to

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