ABSTRACT
Global business has different organizational forms. This chapter focuses on global value chains and argues that the chains constitute organizational forms, in which contractual and informal dependency rather than legal incorporation serves to regulate and govern global production processes. While global value chains are recognized as important drivers of the recent globalization wave beginning in the 1970s, their longer histories are largely neglected in business history literature. This chapter develops a business history research agenda that considers the twentieth century and earlier trajectory of global value chains and thus revisits the different “chain approaches” in global history and economic sociology and geography. A critical review expands Terence Hopkins’ and Immanuel Wallerstein’s commodity chains paradigm in light of recent international economics research on contemporary business sourcing strategies. We then discuss the challenges in detecting value chains posed by gaps in historical trade statistics and input-output models. Based on a review of recent publications on commodity chains, global production networks, and value chains as well as on original research on the global textiles and apparel industry, we propose how business historians may research and analyze the transformation of global value chains in the twentieth century and for the most recent globalization wave since the 1970s.
