Browsing by Author "Gereffi, Gary"

Over the last decades, the global flow of cultural goods and services has significantly grown as a result of liberalized international trade and investment and technological advance. Global cultural production is now flexibly organized and decentralized as more tasks are outsourced into different parts of the world. Yet, the question of how globalization has affected the structure of global cultural industries and upgrading dynamics has not been taken seriously.

This study takes up this question by examining the animation industry in South Korea ("Korea" hereafter) and its changing relationship with global animation production from an historical-comparative perspective from the mid-1960s to the late 2000s. This study attempts to answer several main questions: 1) How did two waves of globalization differently reshape the structure the global animation industry? 2) What are the major characteristics of the Korean animation industry at different stages? 3) How did the differences between U.S. and Japanese outsourcing chains and international coproduction chains affect the upgrading outcomes of Korean suppliers? and 4) Has the Korean state's developmental role been declined, preserved, or reconfigured over time?

Based upon secondary literature and the author's field interviews in Korea, India and Japan in 2008 and 2009, this study finds that the animation industry has been globalized over the last four decades with two distinctive waves of globalization. The first wave until the 1980s involved the rise of offshore outsourcing networks linking the U.S. market to East Asian suppliers. The second wave beginning in the 1990s has restructured the industry through the consolidation and global expansion of media conglomerates, the relocation of offshore outsourcing, and the growth of animation production and consumption in emerging economies.

Throughout the period, the Korean animation industry has undergone three distinctive phases in terms of its development patterns. The development path has been constructed by the interaction of global linkages and local dynamics. The first phase leading up to the mid-1980s is characterized by a gradual integration to global production networks through small-scale processing. The ensuring large-scale, outsourcing-based export growth defines the second phase up until the end of the 1990s. The latest phase is the outcome of a new path in the late 1990s toward upgrading based on local production and international coproduction.

The disaggregation of global forces at the global value chain (GVC) level shows marked differences between U.S. and Japanese outsourcing chains in terms of chain structure, division of labor, firm characteristics, and chain governance. These differences generated distinctive upgrading patterns among two segmented local supplier groups. A quick build-up of large-scale production by consolidated suppliers in the U.S. chains (yet their equally quick decline later) contrasts to a slower pace of upgrading by a large group of fragmented suppliers in Japanese chains. While the structure of emerging international coproduction chains varies by project, power relations between the partner firms are critical to determine the gains captured.

Finally, as for the role of the state, the finding of this study supports the reconfiguration argument that the developmental state, at least in Korea, is not in eclipse but bolstered with a new mode of state intervention and developmental alliance. In the face of growing competitiveness pressure on Korean firms at home and abroad, state-led, export-oriented development strategies have been rather strengthened and extended. Sector-specific industrial policy has increased, not decreased, particularly after the economic crisis of the late 1990s. Industrial policy has been narrowed onto the sector level and strategically engaged in specific chain nodes within the sector. Organizationally, this policy reform was supported by a newly-minted developmental alliance based on original animation exports and the re-embedding of the state onto specialized supportive agencies and new policy constituencies.

These findings are compared and contrasted to the experience of the Indian animation industry to draw implications for upgrading in the global cultural economy, which include: a) globalization as a differentiating and restructuring process; b) the interaction between global integration and local production; c) linkages between local, regional and global markets; and d) value chain-based state intervention.

Among the most significant changes to the agricultural sector in the twentieth century include a sharp decline in employment and the numbers of farms, a decline in the proportion of total value that accrues to agricultural producers, and an increase in farm level and regional specialization. Within the U.S., substantial differences in the characteristics of agricultural producers and the spatial distribution of production persist amid industry change. These changes coincided with changes in global markets, domestic consumption, consolidation and concentration within the processing and retailing sectors, and government policy. The causality that lies behind these developments is the key puzzle that this study addresses.

This study advances an institutional explanation of industry formation across locations within the U.S. Differences in industry constitution at the local level produce different impacts of and responses to global markets, reflected by economic changes and policy developments, as actors work to secure stability and advantage in markets (Fligstein 2001). This study uses the global value chains' definition of the industry, which incorporates the network of actors arrayed along a process of production, to capture the set of actors with the capacity to affect industry operation (Gereffi 1994). An assessment of the relative importance of local economic characteristics, global markets, organization and coordination within industries, and government policies to where production locates in the primary objective of the study.

The pork and non-cigar tobacco industries across several states within the United States from 1959 through 2005 allow for a contrast along the key changes identified above. Within case comparison is used to construct causal narratives of industry change at the state level. Panel and pooled time series analysis assess the relative importance the factors to agricultural change.

Local economic characteristics largely fade from significance with the inclusion of the theoretical perspectives. Total and net trade in agricultural and manufactured products is generally significant across industries for production, although this is not the case for specific tobacco types. The proportion of farms composed of small farms is significant for production and for farm structure in both industries. The presence of manufacture is significant for hog production and could not be assessed for tobacco. While federal policies are broadly significant for the tobacco industry, identified state policies exhibit few consistent effects for hog production. Importantly, farm structure measures were only available for Census years, which reduces sample size. Second, many of the measures are industry-specific, which reduces comparability.