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Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

This chapter explores the reconstruction of the illy’s coffee supply chain in Brazil. The original supply chain was disrupted by fluctuating prices and inefficiencies and renovated based on network relationships between the focal company and the coffee growers. It describes the peculiar experience of illycaffe (an international coffee roaster based in Italy) in building social capital into its supply chain and resulting in a more sustainable network.

The chapter summarizes the development of different types of social capital and applies the concepts to understand illy’s journey towards quality and supply chain sustainability. The research design is consistent with theory elaboration from a single case study.

The chapter applies social capital theory to food commodity supply chains. The evolution to a more reliable and sustainable supply chain for illy’s Arabica coffee in Brazil suggests that supply chain relationships are a crucial asset for the focal firm, the local communities, and society at large. Results also show that developing such relationships might lead to better product quality, supply chain sustainability, and improved supply base capabilities.

The findings of this chapter contribute to the definition of a relational governance model for global food commodity supply chains. From a research standpoint, the empirical setting allows analyses of antecedents and consequences of different social capital components in the food supply chain. In addition, the case may help executives understand how to leverage supply chain relationships and identify a path to product quality and supply chain sustainability.

This study traces the internationalization strategy of Hering, a Brazilian-based apparel company active in manufacturing and retail.

The data set and analysis is presented in chronological order and decisions taken by the company are viewed based on internationalization theories. It presents two main internationalization frameworks, the production network and the value chain models.

While the company started the internationalization process in the 1960s and reached a consistent global presence in distinct markets, it has now retracted from main markets in Europe and North America and is focused on its own distribution network in South America. Hering has changed its strategy of a global production network player into a leader in the retail value chain model with regional distribution. This strategy change has been possible by valuing brand management and distribution instead of manufacturing capacity.

BRIC countries are known for exporting commodities but have poor performance in selling its own branded consumer goods abroad. This study provides such a rare case of a Brazilian consumer good company operating abroad.

Food system channels are proposed to be major components of the larger food system which influence health and illness.

Food system channels are defined, discussed in relationship to other food system components, considered in terms of historical food system changes, examined in relationship to wellbeing and disease, and proposed to have useful applications.

Food system channels are broad, organized, and integrated pathways through which foods and nutrients pass. Channels are larger in scale and scope than previously described food system structures like chains, stages, sectors, networks, and others. Four major types of contemporary Western food system channels differ in their underlying values and health impacts. (1) Industrialized food channels are based on profit as an economic value, which contributes to a diversity of inexpensive foods and chronic diseases. (2) Emergency food channels are based on altruism as a moral value, and try to overcome gaps in industrialized channels to prevent diseases of poverty. (3) Alternative food channels are based on justice and environmentalism as ethical values, and seek to promote wellness and sustainability. (4) Subsistence food channels are based on self-sufficiency as a traditional value, and seek self-reliance to avoid hunger and illness. Historical socioeconomic development of agricultural and industrial transitions led to shifts in food system channels that shaped dietary, nutritional, epidemiological, and mortality transitions.

Food system channels provide varying amounts of calories and types of nutrients that shape wellbeing and diseases. Sociologists and others may benefit from examining food system channels and considering their role in health and illness.

While technologies are often packaged as solutions to long-standing social ills, scholars of digital economies have raised the alarm that, far from liberatory, technologies often further entrench social inequities and in fact automate structures of oppression. This literature has been revelatory but tends to replicate a methodological nationalism that erases global racial hierarchies. We argue that digital economies rely on colonial pathways and in turn serve to replicate a racialized and neocolonial world order. To make this case, we draw on W.E.B. Du Bois' writings on capitalism's historical development through colonization and the global color line. Drawing specifically on The World and Africa as a global historical framework of racism, we develop heuristics that make visible how colonial logics operated historically and continue to this day, thus embedding digital economies in this longer history of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Applying a Du Boisian framework to the production and propagation of digital technologies shows how the development of such technology not only relies on preexisting racial colonial production pathways and the denial of racially and colonially rooted exploitation but also replicates these global structures further.

Work restructuring in the interference of the global and the local is discussed with distribution as starting point of analysis. The distribution sector in The Netherlands is introduced as a local part of a global context in which outsourcing becomes more and more general practice. Logistic chains, in which both production and distribution are incorporated are indicated as a promising level of analysis in gaining more insight in the dynamics of the process of work restructuring. The argument is illustrated by the analysis of the chain of orchid plants.

In this concluding chapter the empirical research on work restructuring that is presented in the different chapters is related to the central question of this volume: in which way is the global produced and reproduced in the local and what does this mean for the (re)structuring of the local? The central themes of the introductory chapter of this volume are taken into account: the increasing impact of the cultural on the economical sphere, the strategic effect of various organizational options, the coming into being of new sectors, labor relations in a globalizing world and the tension between clusterization and relocation of labor. In the last part of this contribution some remarks are made on a possible direction of further research in the field of work restructuring in its glocal context.