Social Upgrading as Market Fantasy: The Limits of Global Value Chain Integration
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Confronted with mixed evidence linking economic upgrading in global value chains to improved social outcomes, proponents have called for a new emphasis on “social upgrading” to promote better employment, gender equality, and poverty reduction. Originally focused on a central role for states, unions, and social movements, the discourse on social upgrading has shifted, emphasizing the benefits of corporate social responsibility and global markets. Drawing on political economic, critical theory, and psychoanalytic paradigms, we explore the politics of this shift and argue that social upgrading is gradually being deployed as a neoliberal market fantasy, designed not to challenge the limits of market integration, but to obscure and deny them. The strength of the social upgrading discourse emerges less from its pretense toward objective, data-driven analysis, than its effectiveness as an ideological fantasy in meeting the contradictory, non-rational desires of experts and non-experts.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it