Workshop to be held in Manchester on 28-29th June 2027

 

The Global Production Network (GPN) approach was created in a period characterised by a relatively open and rules-based international economic order, which provided firms with the certainty to disperse production across borders. As we mark the 25th year since the publication of the founding paper (Henderson, et al., 2002), the GPN framework, together with the cognate Global Value Chain (GVC) approach remain central to understanding the relation between the global dispersal of productive investment and economic development. Yet, new questions emerge as we see a broader reordering of economic globalisation that has unsettled major assumptions.

Disruptions to the rules-based economic order, industrial policy, and economic nationalism are increasingly prominent features of economic governance today, especially as the state re-emerges as a key actor in development. Issues once considered to be external to the global trade regime, such as national security and sovereignty or the rise of populism and authoritarianism, have become central to its organisation. At the same time, the rise of South-South trade and investment flows have reconfigured the geographies of production, not least in light of China’s changing position within the global economy. Increasingly, trade governance is fragmented across regional, bilateral, and sector-specific arrangements.
These shifts intersect with other crucial global transformations that challenge our understandings of how GPNs are organised and governed. The climate crisis and the growing centrality of the sustainability agenda have made environmental governance, standards, and, regulation increasingly central to GPNs. Wider technological transformations, including innovation, artificial intelligence, and digitalisation, are reshaping how production is organised, coordinated, and governed. Accelerating geographical shifts of GPNs linked to the above challenges and transformations also raise important questions about their impact on livelihoods, social reproduction, and economic development in places where GPNs are retreating, as well as in new frontier locations where GPNs now become inserted in both positive and adverse ways.

Alongside strategic coupling, processes of disarticulation are thus increasingly relevant to the analysis of the current restructuring of the global economy. Twenty-five years after the GPN approach was first set out at the University of Manchester, this workshop invites papers that examine the relevance of the GPN framework in today’s global economy, consider the insights it can and cannot provide, and propose ways in which its key insights might be reformulated.

Selected papers will be considered for a special issue proposal, with the workshop serving as an opportunity to receive feedback on draft papers ahead of submission.

 

Thematic streams

We welcome papers that engage with one or more of the following thematic streams:

1. New geographies and (geo)politics of trade and production: Papers in this stream examine the changing political and economic landscape shaping GPNs. It engages with the framework’s iterations (from GPN 1.0 to GPN 2.0) and cognate approaches such as Global Value Chains (GVCs), revisiting the frameworks’ engagement with colonial histories and capitalist relations, alongside the evolving role of the state. It invites contributions that engage with both geopolitics and politics (the rise of authoritarianism and populism), shifts in the global economy (such as growing South-South engagement and the rise of China) and if / how the GPN approach can still offer a meaningful conceptual and analytical tool to understand the broader reorganisation of trade and production.
2.  Environment and sustainability: Papers in this stream examine how environmental change and sustainability agendas are reshaping the organisation, governance, and development implications of GPNs. It invites contributions that engage with the climate crisis, natural resource politics, environmental regulation, and the proliferation of sustainability standards, asking how these dynamics reconfigure relationships between firms, states, workers, producers, consumers, and civil society actors. The stream also considers how green transitions, decarbonisation strategies, and new forms of environmental governance generate uneven opportunities and constraints across different regions, sectors, and actors.
3. Technological shifts: Papers in this stream explore the role of technological change in the reconfiguration of GPNs, with particular attention to digitalisation, automation, platformisation, data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence. The stream asks how new technologies alter the coordination of production, the distribution of value and power across networks, and the spatial organisation of economic activity. It also encourages contributions that examine the implications of technological transformation for labour processes, skill transfer, upgrading, and governance, as well as the uneven ways in which firms, states, and workers are positioned within these shifts.
4. Production and reproduction: Papers in this stream investigate the relationship between production and social reproduction within and beyond GPNs, extending existing debates on labour, informality, gender, and the everyday. The stream examines how global production depends on, reshapes, and can undermine the work, care, and social infrastructures that sustain workers and communities. It invites contributions on adverse incorporation and disarticulation, exploring how exploitation, dispossession, and exclusion affect workers and places unevenly. Particular attention is given to how these processes are shaped by workers’ positions across different networks and by inequalities of gender, race, class, and migration status. The stream also invites contributions that examine how production and reproduction are organised across places and scales, and how contestation over work, livelihoods, and social provision expand current approaches to GPN analysis.

 

Precedence will be given to papers that:

• critically interrogate the validity of the different iterations of the GPN approach in today’s global economy;
• identify the insights the GPN framework can and cannot provide;
• propose directions for its conceptual reformulation, including in dialogue with cognate approaches, such as GVC;
• question how the framework’s evolution has kept pace with changes in the
  global economy;
• address, either theoretically or empirically, areas that the GPN framework has
  underexplored.

 

Submission process

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words, together with your name, affiliation, email, and the thematic stream(s) your paper addresses by 30th November 2026.

Submission portal here: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/H5UHrKMVLq

 

Timeline:

• 30th November: Abstract submission deadline
• December 2026: Notification of outcome
• 4th June 2027: Submission of full paper draft ahead of workshop
• 28-29th June 2027: Workshop in Manchester

 

Organisers

The workshop is hosted by the Global Production Networks, Trade and Labour (GPNTL) group at the University of Manchester.

Lead organiser: Elisa Gambino
Organising Committee: Matt Alford, Shamel Azmeh, Chris Foster, Martin Hess, Rory
Horner, Aarti Krishnan, John Loomis, Khalid Nadvi.

For enquiries, please contact: elisa.gambino@manchester.ac.uk.