Gender and Labor in Supply Chains Capitalism: a Review

Purpose of Review This article reviews some essays recently published that have focused on the social and material relations within production, combining an analytical approach on the spatiality of supply chain capitalism with empirical data on important aspects of life at work for women. Recent Findings Global value chains, a term commonly used today in discussion of global production, represents a field of anthropological, sociological and political analysis of contemporary capitalism. This research area has become richer and more defined in recent years as the result of prominent multidisciplinary studies and innovative research projects that have investigated supply chains as tropes that on the one hand enable the exchange of people, things and ideas across distance and on the other form relations that make new social, economic and political orders possible. Summary The studies reviewed provide detailed and original analysis of how gendered capital-labor relations underpin the expansion of supply networks. They also discuss and reconceptualize this expansion as a growth creating misery that based upon the exploitation and impoverishment of the female workforce.