ABSTRACT
From the perspective of New Zealand in the mid-1980s, Hawke's Bay would have been regarded as a thriving, diversified, export-oriented regional economy centred on land-based production encompassing agriculture, horticulture, forestry and viticulture. This chapter describes the mix of economic and institutional processes that make up and shape the regional components of the some commodity chains under study. It utilizes this to sketch the possibilities and constraints inherent in the evolving structural relations of each chain. This forms the basis of an exploration of the changing geographic scale of embedding and disembedding tendencies associated with these chains. The chapter presents an analysis that questions Gereffi's conclusion that organisational learning and industrial upgrading follow from firms participating in global commodity chains. In contrast to manufacturing sectors where organisational learning is hypothesised to improve the positions of firms in international trade networks, the Hawke's Bay agricultural industries show no real congruence with a 'Gereffian' world.
