Review of Rossi, A., Luinstra, A. and Pickles, J. (eds.) (2014) Towards Better Work: Understanding Labour in Apparel Global Value Chains.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No sector provides a better lens through which to understand the dynamics of globalisation than the global apparel industry.It is the quintessential illustration of the complex nature of globalised production arrangements as captured through the global value chains (GVCs) framework.The apparel sector has been most heavily influenced by international trade regimes, even after the phasing out of the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA) in 2005.It is been marked by shifting patterns of competitiveness and fashion, which have driven demands for higher product quality, but with shorter lead times and greater product variety.It has been the engine for industrialisation in many developing countries, and the sector that has most notably helped transform China into the manufacturing global powerhouse it is today.And, finally, the global apparel industry has faced challenges on environmental impacts associated with fibre, textiles and garment production, and on working conditions.This edited volume on labour in apparel GVCs is directly linked to a collaborative research agenda, undertaken by an international academic network (the Capturing the Gains programme) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).The network investigated the links between economic and social upgrading in GVCs, and the implications for labour and decent work.In its focus on the apparel sector, this volume will be a key resource for years to come.It is targeted both to international academic and key policy audiences as well as advanced research students.It provides some critical conceptual contributions and a rich vein of detailed empirical case studies.At the conceptual level, Mayer and Pickles' contribution considers the ways in which globalisation has led to shifting governance pressures.They consider the now well-known evidence on private governance in the global apparel GVC and the more recent examples of resurgence in public governance.They go on to conclude that the nature of the evolving governance regime is not one that will be marked by a swing from markets back to states, but rather that achieving better labour outcomes will require more complex, complementary and hybrid forms of public and private governance.Bernhardt's contribution uses cross-country evidence to investigate the links between economic and social upgrading.Drawing on macro trade, wage and employment data from the eighteen leading developing countries in the apparel GVC, his analysis shows clearly the dominance of East and South Asian countries in economic upgrading, the prominence of China in social and economic upgrading, and the relatively less impressive outcomes for many sub-Saharan African and Latin American countries that have sought to use the apparel GVC as an industrial strategy for economic and social development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".