2015-2016 SSI participants: Laura Chartain, Lauren Crossland-Marr and Marie Le Clainche-Piel, will all present at the 2017 SASE meetings in Lyon France.
The session will gather papers that analyze challenges faced by global value chains (GVC) when they incorporate, at a local level, heterogenous and global alternative economic approaches such as environmental, moral, ethical, religious and traditional production forms. The analyses presented are based on months of empirical qualitative data collection conducted in different regions of the world with various agents who are assessing, modifying and producing GVCs. How do these alternative production practices and markets challenge GVCs? Specifically, we are interested in how the process of valuation operates in these case studies, which differ from classical economic assumptions. Indeed, we observe the emergence of a dynamic that transforms the relationship between people and objects. These transformations lead to new social and economic ties by attaching specific values (religious, ethical, moral, environmental and traditional) to networks and to commodities. From this perspective, we propose a panel on the different valuation processes observed in our various fieldwork sites.
In addition to showing concrete, specific types of valuation, our papers aim to emphasize processes of co-construction between global ideas, standards and regulations with the local practical processes of production and business. In this sense, the “local” appears as not dominated by the “global” but, rather, as an iterative process that can incorporate and transform global injunctions while creating new markets. Consequently, the market is produced in our research more in the entanglements of daily, social relations under the influence of ethical production proposals rather than static business models.