‘They tell us after they've decided things’: A cross-country analysis of unions and digitalisation in retail

The role of trade unions in the social shaping of digital technologies is a vital question for research, public policy and social justice. This article draws on interviews with two unions in the grocery retail sector in the United Kingdom and Norway, and examines their involvement in technology decisions, and whether they can shape better outcomes for workers. By comparing a ‘neo-liberal’ economy and a ‘Nordic welfare state’, the article considers whether stronger institutional power and regulatory supports in Norway provide for greater influence in a sector regarded as challenging for unions. The findings indicate relatively few country differences and help shed light on the factors that enable and constrain unions’ role in digitalisation.     

Twenty-five years of Living Under Contract: Contract farming and agrarian change in the developing world

The expansion of contract farming schemes through regions of the developing world in the era of the globalization of agriculture raises questions that are central to the study of agrarian political economy. Contract farming has extended the footprint of commodity production and integrated land and labour not otherwise captured in forms of direct production and marketing. 25 years after the publication of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a foundational collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, it is necessary to take stock of the most prominent developments in the practice of contract farming and in the political economy literature studying it. The ultimate contribution of Living Under Contract was framing contract farming as expressing the unevenness of power relations in agriculture and grounding it in specific political, historical and social contexts that were not examined in the mainstream accounts. This introduction to the special issue revisits the questions that have remained relevant or re-emerged in the political economy literature on contract farming; it raises new questions that reflect contemporary developments and it explains how the papers in this collection contribute to the expansion of the theoretical and empirical horizons of the research on contemporary contract farming in low and middle-income countries.     

A supply chain management framework for services

While services represent the largest sector of the global economy, 86.8% in the United States, most supply chain management (SCM) research is focused on product flows. Executives in manufacturing firms have benefited from frameworks created to implement SCM processes, but this is not the case for their counterparts in service companies. The two most cited SCM frameworks for services have methodological and conceptual deficiencies. Drawing upon the service-dominant logic of marketing and using an empirical research approach, we developed supply chain structure maps for nine service firms. Our findings indicate that the supply chain structure maps of service companies are comparable to those in the product-based literature, which supports the service-dominant logic. Then, we identified the six key processes that constitute a framework to manage service supply chains. The customer relationship management and the supplier relationship management processes form the critical links in the supply chain, and the other four processes are coordinated through this linkage. The SCM framework for services provides direction for executives in service firms who need to increase cross-functional integration within their firms and with other members of the supply chain. For academics, 12 avenues for future research are identified.     

Contract farming and everyday acts of resistance: Oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines

Contract violations are critical issues determining the success and sustainability of contract farming (CF). This paper challenges the common portrayal of the “powerful” company versus the “powerless” landowners/smallholders by using the literature on labour agency in global value chains to understand minor contract violations of contract farmers such, as side-selling, refusal to harvest, and burning/felling of oil palm trees. This paper conceptualizes these violations as acts of minor agency or everyday acts of resistance. The analysis highlights how CF has created chains of dependency, in which smallholders are integrated into the modern market economy through new relations of debt and power. In response, contract farmers attempt to influence and shape the CF relation by using these different acts of minor agency. This paper finds that acts of minor agency, in the aggregate, can have important effects on contract relations, governance, and organizational structure of the chain and has the potential to lead to broader changes in the underlying social relations of contract. It highlights how individual acts of minor agency may contribute to the development of a consciousness of collective opposition to the contract relation.     

Ramsey rule with forward/backward utility for long-term yield curves modeling

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper draws a parallel between the economic and financial points of view in the modeling of long-term yield curves and provides new results on asymptotic...