Liam Campling

Labour exploitation in marine fishing industries has received considerable negative publicity. Yet, is there something specific about marine fishing that makes it highly exploitative? We compare work on purse-seiners catching tuna for canning with work on longliners catching tuna for sashimi. We explain difference through a comparative analysis along three axes: (1) tuna population dynamics, fishing technologies and resource access; (2) industrial organization and governance of global production networks; and their relationships with (3) workplace labour regimes on vessels. The article contributes to labour regime analysis by demonstrating the relative material significance of ecology in shaping labour regimes.

China is the home of the world's largest distant water fishing (DWF) fleet. Narratives of its expansion portray China as a voracious consumer of ocean resources, as a serial abuser of labour and as aggressively expanding into developing country waters in an ‘extractivist’ drive that destroys small scale fishers' livelihoods. Yet, what does taking a historical and relational view tell us about China's activities vis‐à‐vis other DWF nations? Is the relationship with coastal states an example of ‘neocolonialism’ or, as the Chinese party‐state insists, ‘mutual benefit’? And should one read China's DWF fleet as a tool of ‘grand strategy’ directed from Beijing or as rational profit‐seeking individual firms, opportunistically driven into new frontiers by the exhaustion of domestic resources? This article seeks to navigate these binaries to argue that China's DWF fleet is the most recent example in a long history of pelagic imperialism by advanced capitalist fishing interests, where fish are a raw material in a wider generative industrial strategy and fishing activity is a tool in geopolitics. It is argued that China's DWF fleet is best understood as a relatively coherent cluster of capitals‐in‐competition, set in a mosaic of variegated state‐capital relations, in tension at different relational scales. The article also offers suggestions for future research on DWF industries.

We develop and deploy a business politics lens to examine the mechanisms and processes of negotiation through which multinational enterprises (MNEs) and various host country actors interact, leading to different regional trajectories of economic development. We assess two contrasting lead firms from differing home country contexts investing in the automotive industry in Romania, operating in two regions with distinct historical-spatial industrial organization and economic development. We advance a contribution on business politics as dynamic, relational, multi-scalar, and influenced by varied conjunctural factors—historical, geographical, political, institutional, and firm-driven—exposing how MNEs and territorial actors co-shape distinct processes of international economic (dis)integration.

In recent decades, fishing fleets and effort have grown in aggregate throughout the waters of lower-income coastal countries, much of which is carried out by vessels registered in higher-income countries. Fisheries access arrangements (FAAs) underpin this key trend in ocean fisheries and have their origins in UNCLOS’s promise to establish resource ownership as a mechanism to increase benefits to newly independent coastal and island states. Coastal states use FAAs to permit a foreign state, firm, or industry association to fish within its waters. This paper provides a conceptual approach for understanding FAAs across the global ocean and for exploring their potential to deliver on the promise of UNCLOS. Illustrated with the findings from multiple case studies, we advance understanding of FAAs by developing a geopolitical-economy of access that attends to the combination of contingent and context-specific economic, ecologic, and geopolitical forces that shape the terms, conditions and practices of the FAAs shaping this persistent phenomenon of higher-income industrial fleets fishing throughout lower-income countries’ waters.

This intervention develops arguments in our book Capitalism and the Sea on the complex temporalities attached to capitalism's intense and peculiar relationship to the global ocean. Technological innovations like the steamship or containerisation plainly transformed the pace and intensity of maritime commerce, and aspects of the global economy. We take this further to argue that the very origins and periodisation of capitalism are connected to the global ocean; as will be our futures, given the unpredictable implications of the oceans acting as the biosphere's ‘heat sink’. We consider several stylised expressions of time at sea: deep‐time, logistical‐time, life‐time, and revolutionary time suggesting that the ocean world as a geographical space articulates these in distinctive and contradictory ways.

This article explores the interrelationship between global production networks (GPNs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) in the South Korean auto industry and its employment relations. It focuses on the production network of the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) — the third biggest automobile manufacturer in the world — and the FTA between the EU and South Korea. This was the first of the EU's ‘new generation’ FTAs, which among other things contained provisions designed to protect and promote labour standards. The article's argument is twofold. First, that HMG's production network and Korea's political economy (of which HMG is a crucial part) limited the possibilities for the FTA's labour provisions to take effect. Second, that the commercial provisions in this same FTA simultaneously eroded HMG's domestic market and corporate profitability, leading to adverse consequences for auto workers in the more insecure and low‐paid jobs. In making this argument, the article advances a multi‐scalar conceptualization of the labour regime as an analytical intermediary between GPNs and FTAs. It also provides one of the first empirical studies of the EU–South Korea FTA in terms of employment relations, drawing on 105 interviews with trade unions, employer associations, automobile companies and state officials across both parties.

This commentary on Chapter 6 on Markets, Finance, and Corporations of the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP 2018) report makes four points. The first suggests that proposals for legal reform of the corporation require consideration of the underlying processes of capital accumulation. Second, thinking about the articulations of global value chains and the law could help better appreciate their combined role in the geographical transfer of value. The third notes the potential for the greater analytical integration of financial and corporate dynamics through the study of the financialisation of production. Finally, it argues that future work by the IPSP should examine the articulations of political economy and global environmental change, and the spaces for ‘social progress’ therein.

This paper introduces the term ‘terraqueous territoriality’ to analyse a particular relationship between capitalism as a social formation, and the sea as a natural force. It focuses on three spaces – exclusive economic zones, the system of ‘flags of convenience’ and multilateral counter-piracy initiatives – as instances of capitalist states and firms seeking to transcend the geo-physical difference between firm land and fluid sea. Capital accumulation, it is argued here, seeks to territorialise the sea through forms of sovereignty and modes of appropriation drawn from experiences on land, but in doing so encounters particular tensions thereby generating distinctive spatial effects. By exploring the articulation between sovereignty, territory and appropriation in the organisation of spaces where land meets sea, the article seeks to demonstrate the value of an analytical framework that underlines the terraqueous nature of contemporary capitalism.