Multinational Corporations And The Third World by C.J. Dixon

Author:C.J. Dixon [Dixon, C.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415751988
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Methodological and Theoretical Preliminaries

Understanding the meaning and logic of the development of an international division of labour within any industrial branch necessitates attention to the structure of capitalist commodity production at large; the central dynamics of labour processes in the context of the contradictory capital-labour relation; the internal and external organization of industrial production; the socio-spatial consequences of these phenomena; and the way this ensemble of relations changes over time. With regard to the American semiconductor industry, a full account of these features would necessarily begin with an examination of the industry in its core location, Santa Clara County, California. It would focus for instance on the technical and spatial articulation of the industry’s component labour processes; the extent to which they were capital rather than labour intensive; conflicts arising from contradictions in the labour process and in the social and spatial reproduction of the labour force (and its various sectors); the nature of the product (the extent to which it was a low-volume, high-value, customized product or a large-volume, low-value standardized output) and its market; and the extent to which there were government and/or planning regulations which inhibited the possibilities for continued accumulation in the core. As these determinants and others have been analysed in detail elsewhere (Henderson and Scott, 1984), there is no need to traverse that ground in detail here. Some methodological and theoretical comments are, however, in order.

If we wish to avoid the elaboration of theoretically incoherent accounts of the spatial development of an industrial branch we need to take seriously Sayer’s (1982, 1984) distinction between relations that are internally necessary to the development of a phenomenon, and those that are externally contingenté This does not mean, of course, that externally contingent relations are to be treated as of no account in social scientific explanation. On the contrary, such relations are of importance in the analysis of particular empirical outcomes. What it does mean, however, is that these relations do not constitute the primary determinants of the phenomenon in general, and have significance only in the context of their articulation with the primary determinants (the internally necessary relations) in particular empirical circumstances. For an analysis of the spatial development and social impact of semiconductor production (or any industrial branch), this methodological prescription implies that its function as a part of capitalist commodity production at large is the essential starting point, and hence relations associated with valorization are crucial. Consequently our analysis of the internationalization of the American semiconductor industry begins by focussing on its labour processes and technical change.

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