Dear Colleagues,

We are excited to invite you to submit your research to a special issue on ‘Ambivalence in Global Production: Conceptual and Empirical Insights’, to be published in the Journal of Economic Geography. This issue will explore the complexities and contradictions inherent in global production.

The deadline for abstracts is February 27th, 2024, and for the full papers, September 3rd, 2024.

We're also organizing a virtual seminar in which potential authors will be invited to present their drafts and receive feedback. Details about the seminar will be circulated to potential authors at a later date.

Please find more details on the call for papers below (including the guest editors’ contact details) and at the journal webpage: https://academic.oup.com/joeg/pages/call-for-papers-si-ambivalence-in-global-production  

Thank you,

Tiago Teixeira, Erika Faigen, Roseline Wanjiru



Call for Papers: Special Issue on ambivalence in global production: conceptual and empirical insights.

Guest editors:
Tiago Teixeira, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK
Erika Faigen, University of Vienna, Austria
Roseline Wanjiru, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, UK

Descriptions of the state of our world may draw on terms such as post-pandemic, multi-polar, climate-changing, decentralizing, and deglobalizing. These terms articulate a sense of uncertainty, hopelessness, division and fragmentation which is impacted by and impacts the current state of global production. Meanwhile, our world is more interconnected than it has ever been, enabled by a space-time reduction due to advances in information technology. These technological advancements facilitate conversations, information exchange and knowledge sharing in novel ways that expediate and intensify global production. These technological developments may also facilitate transparency, which, in turn, can help scholars to better understand global production. Yet there is the risk of studies to describe global production through opposing terms such as opportunities and threats, strengths and weaknesses, positive and negative, and costs and benefits, among others. This raises concern on whether an amplified focus on certain terms may result in some being emphasized disproportionally while others are marginalized. This skewed emphasis, which may be driven by power dynamics, can lead to inaccurate world descriptions. The fabric of our world, and the role of global production in it, cannot accurately be explained in methodologies, concepts, and theories (re)producing understandings that are starkly reductionist and divisive when multiple global challenges are altering livelihoods across the world and need understandings about the global common, and its many, varied constituent parts.

As geographers, we are hosted in a discipline that welcomes and cherishes varied methodological and conceptual perspectives, and rich empirical contributions. This remarkable openness manifests also in the literature on global production which covers various approaches and conceptual frameworks in political and economic geography, international business, and innovation studies – for example, including, but not limited to literatures on global commodity and value chains, global production networks, evolutionary economic geography, FDI studies, diverse and community economies (Coe & Yeung 2015; Bridge et al. 2018; Asheim et al. 2019; Raven et al. 2021). These streams of literature explore, in most broad terms, how actors such as workers, firms, the state, and civil society organizations engage at and across various scales in the global economy. One topic deserving particular scrutiny, given that it has received comparatively little attention in before-mentioned literatures, pertains to how this engagement in the global economy can result in uneven outcomes. Notable scholarly advancements in the literatures are contributions such as on disarticulations and uneven development (Werner & Bair 2019); dialectics of association and dissociation (Ibert et al. 2019); strategic coupling and its dark sides (MacKinnon 2012); left-behind places (Rodríguez-Pose 2018; Tomaney et al. 2023); responsible innovation (Fuenfschilling et al. 2022); resource-making controversies (Kama 2020); power, governance and inequalities in global production (Smith et al. 2018; Fu & Lim 2022; Ponte et al. 2023); and discourses and narratives (Simoens et al. 2022; Leipold et al. 2023). However, there remains considerable potential for theoretical and empirical elaboration connecting the constitutive dynamics and multifaceted consequences of participation in global production (Phelps et al. 2018).

This Special Issue seeks to address this gap by inviting submissions with scholarly work around ambivalence in global production, which involves diverse actors and organizational entanglements at multiple scales in various geographies – Asia, Oceania and Australia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. We are interested in papers that add conceptual and analytical weight to nuancing the representation and accounts of ambivalence in the constitutive processes, and in the outcomes of global production. Specifically, we are interested in papers that address and respond to the following questions:
•	How do existing concepts in the literature concerned with global production articulate ambivalence in global production? Is there potential for 
 improving, rethinking and advancing these articulations?
•	How does ambivalence in global production emerge in constitutive processes of geographical and organizational configurations?
•	How does ambivalence in global production transpire through outcomes at various geographical and organizational scales?

Potential topics could include but are not limited to:
•	asymmetrical relations, agency, power and governance
•	labor, households, consumption and reproduction
•	innovation, skills, knowledge and technological paradigms
•	resources, energy and the environment
•	diverse framings of global production that connect with communities
•	global production and policy-making
•	financialization of global production



Submission of papers.
For expressions of interest through abstracts, contact the Guest Editors:
[log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]

Deadline: September 2024

References
Asheim, B. T., Isaksen, A., & Trippl, M. (2019). Advanced introduction to regional innovation systems. Cheltenham: Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Bridge, G., Barr, S., Bouzarovski, S., Bradshaw, M., Brown, E., Bulkeley, H. & G. Walker (2018). Energy and society: A critical perspective. Routledge.
Coe, N. M., & H.W.-C. Yeung (2015). Global production networks: theorizing economic development in an interconnected world. Oxford University Press.
Fu, W. & K.F. Lim (2022) The Constitutive Role of State Structures in Strategic Coupling: On the Formation and Evolution of Sino-German Production Networks in Jieyang, China, Economic Geography, 98:1, 25-48.
Fuenfschilling, L., Paxling, L., & Perez Vico, E. (2022). Norm-critical innovation as a way forward for responsible innovation? Evidence from a Swedish innovation policy program. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 9(3), 371-397.
Ibert, O., Hess, M., Kleibert, J., Müller, F., & Power, D. (2019). Geographies of dissociation: value creation,‘dark’places, and ‘missing’links. Dialogues in Human Geography, 9(1), 43-63.
Kama, K. (2020). Resource-making controversies: knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels. Progress in Human Geography 44 (2): 333-356.
Leipold, S., Petit‐Boix, A., Luo, A., Helander, H., Simoens, M., Ashton, W. S., ... & Xue, B. (2023). Lessons, narratives, and research directions for a sustainable circular economy. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 27(1), 6-18.
MacKinnon, D. (2012). Beyond strategic coupling: reassessing the firm-region nexus in global production networks. Journal of Economic Geography, 12(1), 227-245.
Phelps, N. A., Atienza, M., & Arias, M. (2018). An invitation to the dark side of economic geography. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50(1), 236-244.
Ponte, S., Bair, J., & Dallas, M. (2023). Power and inequality in global value chains: Advancing the research agenda. Global Networks 23 (4), 679-686.
Raven, R., Reynolds, D., Lane, R., Lindsay, J., Kronsell, A., & Arunachalam, D. (2021). Households in sustainability transitions: A systematic review and new research avenues. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 40, 87-107.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The revenge of the places that don’t matter (and what to do about it). Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 11 (1), 189-209.
Simoens, M.C., Fuenfschilling, L. & Leipold, S. (2022). Discursive dynamics and lock-ins in socio-technical systems: an overview and a way forward. Sustainability Science 17, 1841-1853.
Smith, A., Barbu, M., Campling, L., Harrison, J., & Richardson, B. (2018). Labor regimes, global production networks, and European Union trade policy: Labor standards and export production in the Moldovan clothing industry. Economic geography, 94(5), 550-574.
Tomaney, J., Blackman, M., Natarajan, L., Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, D., Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F., & Taylor, M. (2023). Social infrastructure and ‘left-behind places’. Regional Studies, 1-14.
Werner, M., & Bair, J. (2019). Global value chains and uneven development: a disarticulations perspective In Ponte, S., Gereffi, G. & Raj-Reichert, G. (Eds.) Handbook on Global Value Chains. Edward Elgar Publishing.

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