With Great Power There Must Also Come Great Responsibility’: How the Semiconductor Industry Deals with Uncertainty in Light of Geopolitical and Supply Chain Disruptions

Transnational industries have experienced significant disruptions to fundamental business ties worldwide: tariffs during the China-US trade dispute under the first Trump administration, subsequent export controls on trade with China under the Biden Administration, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is yet to be understood how these disruptions transform transnational industries. Thus, this dissertation asks how actors in complex transnational industries solve problems during supply chain and geopolitical disruptions. It examines this question by using the transnational semiconductor industry from 2018 to 2025 as a case study. While this industry was previously characterized by highly efficient transnational division of labor, the disruptions mentioned above revealed the fragility of these structures and ultimately prompted state interventions such as the EU and US Chips Acts. Engaging with pragmatic theories of change, economic sociology, and the economics of convention, this dissertation shows that not only do new activities emerge to address these disruptions, but also new cognitive understandings of the role that transnational relationships will play in the future within the industry. Building on over 30 interviews and 300 documents, it applies a transnational research design by following the transnational trajectories of a multitude of semiconductor companies. The major finding is that semiconductor companies are increasingly confronted with a multitude of responsibilities from governments, customers, and industry stakeholders. Rather than completely subjugating themselves to a single responsibility, companies negotiate between different kinds of responsibilities, building compromises between new regionalized structures while also holding on to the old transnational structure to some extent.