Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains and Industrial Clusters: Why Governance Matters

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.The burgeoning literature on global value chains (GVCs) has recast our understanding of how industrial clusters are shaped by their ties to the international economy, but within this context, the role played by corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to evolve. New research in the past decade allows us to better understand how CSR is linked to industrial clusters and GVCs. With geographic production and trade patterns in many industries becoming concentrated in the global South, lead firms in GVCs have been under growing pressure to link economic and social upgrading in more integrated forms of CSR. This is leading to a confluence of “private governance” (corporate codes of conduct and monitoring), “social governance” (civil society pressure on business from labor organizations and non-governmental organizations), and “public governance” (government policies to support gains by labor groups and environmental activists). This new form of “synergistic governance” is illustrated with evidence from recent studies of GVCs and industrial clusters, as well as advances in theorizing about new patterns of governance in GVCs and clusters.

Prototypes, exemplars, and theoretical & applied ethics

Concepts are mental representations that are the constituents of thought. EdouardMachery claims that psychologists generally understand concepts to be bodies of knowledge or information carrying mental states stored in long term memory that are used in the higher cognitive competences such as in categorization judgments, induction, planning, and analogical reasoning. While most research in the concepts field generally have been on concrete concepts such as LION, APPLE, and CHAIR, this paper will examine abstract moral concepts and whether such concepts may have prototype and exemplar structure. After discussing the philosophical importance of this project and explaining the prototype and exemplar theories, criticisms will be made against philosophers, who without experimental support from the sciences of the mind, contend that moral concepts have prototype and/or exemplar structure. Next, I will scrutinize Mark Johnson's experimentally-based argument that moral concepts have prototype structure. Finally, I will show how our moral concepts may indeed have prototype and exemplar structure as well as explore the further ethical implications that may be reached by this particular moral concepts conclusion. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.