Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and...

To enhance the welfare of smallholder farmers, development agencies increasingly promote “value chain agriculture” where farmers partner with more powerful entities such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to create new sources of economic value. Via an ethnographic...

In the 1980s and 1990s, during the high-water mark of Washington Consensus development, rural sociologists and geographers critical of contract farming described contract as a legal fiction—one that imagines formally equal and voluntary relations between large firms and small farmers and hence...

This article argues that Mary Parker Follett developed a socialist theory of negotiation in response to early twentieth century labor struggle (at least if socialism means the democratization of economic life). This defining feature of Follett’s work has been forgotten amongst negotiation...