Analysis of Global Production Networks within Consumer Electronic Industry.
Introduction
A diagnostic characteristic of contemporary globalization is that the component parts of the world economy are increasingly interconnected in qualitatively different ways from the past. Another way of saying this is that the world economy consists of tangled webs of production circuits and networks that cut through, and across, all geographical scales, including the bounded territory of the state.
It is too simple to just define the global production networks, that involving a process of production, distribution and consumption of commodities, goods and services, as technical-economic mechanisms (Coe, Dicken and Hess, 2008). More than this oversimplified conceptual framework, Levy (2008) argues GPN as ‘simultaneously economic and political phenomena . . . organizational fields in which actors struggle over the construction of economic relationships, governance structures, institutional rules and norms, and discursive frames . . . GPNs thus exist within the ‘‘transnational space’’ that is constituted and structured by transnational elites, institutions, and ideologies’. In Levy’s theory, we can find out that more than a economic process of productions, GPNs is also a ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ phenomena in which the geographically differentiated political and social cultural circumstance are also shaped (Coe, Dicken and Hess, 2008).
Considering the consumer electronic industry in particular, what we can see now is that numerous branded firms has evolved as the leading force, such as Apple, Microsoft and HP. Meanwhile, amount of emerging economies became to participate into this industry more and more, therefore turning GPNs into a more complex concept in current globalisation. Since then, there are increasing considerations and discussion related to governance of GPNs, trying to