Global Labour Chains, Social Class, and the International Division of Labour

Since the pioneering work of Hopkins and Wallerstein (1977), the concept of commodity chains has provided a powerful framework for tracing the transnational organization of production and exchange. Subsequent developments, including Global Commodity Chains (GCC), Global Value Chains (GVC), and Global Production Networks (GPN), have deepened our understanding of how firms, institutions, and territories are integrated within globalized production systems.

While these approaches have significantly enhanced our understanding of the transnational organization of production, they also point toward the need to follow workers across the interconnected stages of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and waste management. Such a perspective opens new avenues for analysing social class, labour processes and the evolving international division of labour in a globalized economy.

Building on Van der Linden’s concept of Global Labour Chains, this session provides an opportunity to review emerging research on global labour chains and to discuss its implications for the study of social class, occupational trajectories, and the changing international division of labour. It examines how workers located in different regions of the world become linked through interconnected processes of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and end-of-life management. The session aims to explore how contemporary global labour chains reshape class positions, social mobility and relations of dependency across the world economy.

The session welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions addressing global labour chains, class formation, labour governance, migration, occupational mobility, gendered and racialized divisions of labour, environmental transitions, and the changing architecture of the international division of labour in the twenty-first century.