SASE Annual Meeting 2012, MIT, USA: Professionals between market and hierarchy: a comparative political economy perspective

This year's SASE conference theme is Global Shifts. I chose ‘shifts’ in the plural, rather than the singular,1 to capture the multiple dimensions of transformation taking place as part of the phenomenon of globalization. They include the rise of new emerging national powers, the spread of global value chains from manufacturing to services and the reassertion of the state in financial regulation and industrial policy. To these rapidly unfolding events, policy makers and politicians, as practical men and women, are struggling to respond with both new and old ideas, with the hope of not being ‘slaves of some defunct economist’.2 For SASE members and social scientists at large, a central question, as ever before, is: do we have sufficiently powerful theoretical frameworks to analyze these global shifts and their consequences? In this Address, I select one of the global shifts as a foil to test the resilience of existing analytical lenses. I focus on the proliferation of global value chains beyond agriculture and manufacturing to services, including knowledge-intensive ‘technical, administrative, and professional services’ (Gereffi et al., 2005; Lewin et al., 2009; Gereffi and Fernandez-Stark, 2010; Fernandez-Stark et al., 2011). This is commonly known as offshoring. Tasks requiring high levels of skill that were formerly considered the sole province of the advanced economies are being performed offshore on behalf of corporate and individual consumers in advanced economies. These tasks involve reading X-rays, carrying out lab experiments for new drug discovery, developing engineering design, administering payroll for companies and preparing documents for filing patents. The rise of emerging market locations such as India and China to undertake such business services has led to fear of job losses by white-collar workers in advanced economies (Blinder, 2009; Lewin et al., 2009). The emergence of global value chains in business services also involves a change in the international division of labor, and potentially alters the distribution of power and wealth in the global economy. It is for the purpose of addressing this issue, central to the operation of contemporary economies, that I argue that our analytical tool kit needs sharpening and updating.