Marion Werner
Biographic Data
| ID | 3696675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marion Werner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marion |
| FAMILY NAME | Werner |
| SIGNATURE | WERNER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Buffalo, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5000-3053 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 602 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Keeping capital at arm’s length
Constructing a theoretically informed, historically grounded understanding of capitalist circuits of value and uneven development remains a challenge. Thomas Cowan's ‘Geographies of subsumption’ offers a lucid discussion of subsumption as an analytical framework to cut through this Gordian knot of the abstract–concrete. Of note is Cowan's discussion of formal subsumption in relation to land, as arrangements that variously preserve landed interest…
Social reproduction and agrarian change
Dependent Articulation in the Global Pesticide Complex
Since the late 1990s, the pesticide industry has undergone a ‘generics revolution’ as the centre of production, and trade has shifted to the global South. China and India have become major producers, capturing Latin American markets from Northern multinationals. As a major pesticide user and a key node in global supply chains, Argentina offers an exemplary case to understand these dynamics. The country's long‐established pesticide sector has unde…
Embedded Pesticide Use
Since the turn of the century, global land grabs, farmland financialization and land‐based food sovereignty movements have returned the land question to the heart of agrarian studies. Meanwhile, abiding interest in pesticides has been reanimated in the face of changes in production, regulation and knowledge of toxicity. Yet the nexus of pesticides and land remains underappreciated—and under‐researched. This paper thus argues for more attention to…
The “Pesticide Chip
For decades, agro‐industrial capital has adopted cascading chemical and biotechnical interventions, or fixes, to secure accumulation through the cultivation of monocrops. We develop a framework that centres on how monocrop‐induced susceptibility to pests and pathogens—and the patchwork of fixes to address these—produces uneven chemical geographies. These uneven geographies are not produced by capital alone, but rather they are co‐constituted thro…
El ensamblaje del glifosato
A onipresença de produtos químicos exige novas formas de pensar as relações entre humanos e natureza. Este artigo propõe um diálogo entre a economia política agrária, a pesquisa crítica de cadeias de valor e as geografias químicas, por meio de um estudo de caso do agrotóxico mais utilizado no mundo: o glifosato. Na década de 1980, o glifosato triunfou como um biocida benigno que prometia segurança e eficácia. Essa construção possibilitou a formaç…
Global pesticide complex
The Generics Revolution and the New Economic Geography of the Global Pesticide Industry
The global pesticide industry transformed from one dominated by patented products and legacy multinationals with strong manufacturing bases in the United States and EU to one dominated by generic products produced in India and China. We use proprietary market research data, data from regulatory filings, industry press and bilateral trade data to map how the 'generics revolution' transformed production and trade in pesticides. Tracing significant …
Macht-/Wissensbeziehungen in der Wirtschaftsgeographie infrage stellen
Global pesticide use and trade database (GloPUT)
A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides
The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives al…
Regulation by impasse
Costa Rica's prodigious use of pesticides, as well as the burgeoning plantation sector that these agrochemicals support, exacerbates the tensions between extraction and preservation at the heart of the country's development model. We explore these tensions through a study of the country's pesticide registry, the regulatory process to approve active ingredients and formulations for use. After nearly two decades of reform efforts, the registry is w…
Reorienting new state capitalism to food and agriculture
Scholarship on global agri-food regulation would contribute much to new state capitalism debates, which to date largely ignore this field. Contradictions within the global arrangement of corporations, international agencies, national governments and trade architecture governing agriculture in the 1990s set the stage for more robust state roles post-2008. Food price volatility catalyzed neomercantilist policies while, paradoxically, deepening glob…
A dialogue on uneven development
Uneven development is back and high on academic, policy and political agendas. Resurgent sociospatial inequality and national discourses are a timely illustration of this enduring feature of the capitalist space economy. Building on an in-conversation Regional Studies Association (RSA) webinar, leading researchers discuss what the current conjuncture of capitalism and its historical geographical specificities mean for uneven spatial development. …
The Glyphosate Assemblage
The ubiquity of chemicals demands new ways of thinking about human–nature assemblages. This article develops a dialogue between agrarian political economy, critical commodity chains research, and chemical geographies through a case study of the world’s most widely used agrochemical: glyphosate, commonly known as Monsanto’s Roundup. In the 1980s, glyphosate triumphed as a benign biocide that promised both safety and effectiveness. This construct m…
Geographies of production III
This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strate…
"Capitalist crisis in the "age of global value chains
In this article, we analyze the strategies, surprises, and sidesteps in the World Bank's 2020 World Development Report, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains . Strategically, the Report promotes an expansion of neoliberal globalization couched in the language of global value chains. Curiously detached from the broader academic literature on global value chains in international trade, it promotes a sequentialist vision of globa…
Placing the state in the contemporary food regime
This paper interrogates the role of the state in the contemporary food regime and argues that it is best understood as the outcome of uneven regulatory development. This concept centers the ways that legacy institutions and practices of previous food regimes persist and combine with neoliberal regulation. It is developed through an in-depth case study of agro-food regulation in the Dominican Republic, focusing on domestic rice production. The ana…
Geographies of production II
As corporate power strains the liberal hegemony that has stabilized the globalization project, it is no wonder that scholars of global production are increasingly turning their attention to the role of the state. While the long-held assumption that the state primarily acted to facilitate capital’s priorities remains accurate, it is nonetheless incomplete. I discuss studies that focus on other state roles (regulator, buyer and producer) and pay pa…
Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration
While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case …
Keywords in Radical Geography
Will you be my mentor?’ Feminist mentoring at mid-career for institutional change
This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each other from cynicism and despair. Placing these experiences and dialogues in conversation with the ex…
International trade and the neoliberal diet in Central America and the Dominican Republic
The Doreen Massey Reader
Doreen Massey Critical Dialogues
Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism
There is no abstract for this paper
Feminist political economy in geography
Guest Editorial
What are surfaces?" So much of life occurs at the surface that, as students of the human scene, we are obliged to pay far more attention to its character (subtlety, variety, and density) than we have done.The scholar's neglect and suspicion of surface phenomena is a consequence of a dichotomy in western thought between surface and depth, sensory appreciation and intellectual understanding, with bias against the first of the two terms
Geographies of production I
Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This progress report parses three of thes…
The Place of Disarticulations
Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a 'disarticulations' perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and disposses…
Global Displacements
"Challenging the main ways we debate globalization, this book reveals how uneven geographies of capitalist development shape--and are shaped by--the aspirations and everyday struggles of people in the global South"
Geographies of production II
As corporate power strains the liberal hegemony that has stabilized the globalization project, it is no wonder that scholars of global production are increasingly turning their attention to the role of the state. While the long-held assumption that the state primarily acted to facilitate capital’s priorities remains accurate, it is nonetheless incomplete. I discuss studies that focus on other state roles (regulator, buyer and producer) and pay pa…
A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides
The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives al…
The Glyphosate Assemblage
The ubiquity of chemicals demands new ways of thinking about human–nature assemblages. This article develops a dialogue between agrarian political economy, critical commodity chains research, and chemical geographies through a case study of the world’s most widely used agrochemical: glyphosate, commonly known as Monsanto’s Roundup. In the 1980s, glyphosate triumphed as a benign biocide that promised both safety and effectiveness. This construct m…
Global production networks and uneven development
This paper examines global production networks through the lens of uneven development. Although originally concerned with asymmetries in the global economy, in the 1990s, global production network studies shifted decidedly towards a focus upon realizing the mutual benefits of engagement between multinationals, their suppliers, and the regions where the latter were located. Recent trends in supply chain restructuring, thrown into sharp relief by t…
Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post-Washington Consensus
Over the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral agencies in order to understand the purchase of value chain approaches within the development field. Mixing GVC perspectives with other theoretical i…
Spatiality, sweatshops and solidarity in Guatemala
Uneven development in Guatemala has been fuelled by international investment flows and a 1984 law that established a patchwork pattern of each factory as its own free-trade zone. The spatial and social flexibility of this form of labour regulation requires workers to be creative in defending their rights. Our paper explores the creative potential of transnational worker/consumer/student alliances, or mixed coalitions as we call them, to influence…
Geographies of production III
This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strate…
Beyond Upgrading
In the literature on global commodity chains, industrial upgrading describes the process whereby firms shift to more secure or more profitable niches within or between industries through organizational learning facilitated by networks. While the framework of upgrading identifies key dynamics of competition between capitals, it nonetheless sidelines inquiry into how such imperatives condition and are conditioned by labor. To address this conceptua…
A dialogue on uneven development
Uneven development is back and high on academic, policy and political agendas. Resurgent sociospatial inequality and national discourses are a timely illustration of this enduring feature of the capitalist space economy. Building on an in-conversation Regional Studies Association (RSA) webinar, leading researchers discuss what the current conjuncture of capitalism and its historical geographical specificities mean for uneven spatial development. …
Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo, NY
Placing the state in the contemporary food regime
This paper interrogates the role of the state in the contemporary food regime and argues that it is best understood as the outcome of uneven regulatory development. This concept centers the ways that legacy institutions and practices of previous food regimes persist and combine with neoliberal regulation. It is developed through an in-depth case study of agro-food regulation in the Dominican Republic, focusing on domestic rice production. The ana…
Coloniality and the Contours of Global Production in the Dominican Republic and Haiti
To destabilize sequentialist, stage-like understandings of global production, this paper examines changing relations of accumulation taking shape in the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I draw upon a framework called “the coloniality of power” to consider the reworking of the social and spatial boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations. Through a critical ethnogr…
Global pesticide use and trade database (GloPUT)
Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration
While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case …
"Capitalist crisis in the "age of global value chains
In this article, we analyze the strategies, surprises, and sidesteps in the World Bank's 2020 World Development Report, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains . Strategically, the Report promotes an expansion of neoliberal globalization couched in the language of global value chains. Curiously detached from the broader academic literature on global value chains in international trade, it promotes a sequentialist vision of globa…
Embodied negotiations
In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse sha…
The Generics Revolution and the New Economic Geography of the Global Pesticide Industry
The global pesticide industry transformed from one dominated by patented products and legacy multinationals with strong manufacturing bases in the United States and EU to one dominated by generic products produced in India and China. We use proprietary market research data, data from regulatory filings, industry press and bilateral trade data to map how the 'generics revolution' transformed production and trade in pesticides. Tracing significant …
New Geographies of Uneven Development in Global Formation
Free Trade
The content of global free-trade rules and the number of nations beholden to them have expanded dramatically since the Uruguay round of multilateral negotiations; much of it through agreements to form preferential trade areas (PTAs). Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality studies, this paper explores how the spaces of 'free trade' are produced through neoliberal spatial and political imaginaries and material practices to construct 'barriers to tr…
Spatiality, sweatshops and solidarity in Guatemala
Uneven development in Guatemala has been fuelled by international investment flows and a 1984 law that established a patchwork pattern of each factory as its own free-trade zone. The spatial and social flexibility of this form of labour regulation requires workers to be creative in defending their rights. Our paper explores the creative potential of transnational worker/consumer/student alliances, or mixed coalitions as we call them, to influence…
Worldly Encounters in Free Trade
Free Trade
The content of global free-trade rules and the number of nations beholden to them have expanded dramatically since the Uruguay round of multilateral negotiations; much of it through agreements to form preferential trade areas (PTAs). Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality studies, this paper explores how the spaces of 'free trade' are produced through neoliberal spatial and political imaginaries and material practices to construct 'barriers to tr…
After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean
Embodied negotiations
In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse sha…
Coloniality and the Contours of Global Production in the Dominican Republic and Haiti
To destabilize sequentialist, stage-like understandings of global production, this paper examines changing relations of accumulation taking shape in the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I draw upon a framework called “the coloniality of power” to consider the reworking of the social and spatial boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations. Through a critical ethnogr…
Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism
There is no abstract for this paper
The Place of Disarticulations
Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a 'disarticulations' perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and disposses…
Beyond Upgrading
In the literature on global commodity chains, industrial upgrading describes the process whereby firms shift to more secure or more profitable niches within or between industries through organizational learning facilitated by networks. While the framework of upgrading identifies key dynamics of competition between capitals, it nonetheless sidelines inquiry into how such imperatives condition and are conditioned by labor. To address this conceptua…
The Devil Wears Dockers
This essay examines popular narratives that a spirit demon or bacá lurked in an export garment plant in the Santiago trade zone of the Dominican Republic in the early 2000s. By interpreting thebacástory, and the transformation of the bacá itself from a rural context to an urban factory, we unpack the changing nature and meaning of employment under neoliberal capitalism, and tease apart complex geographies of status, exploitation, technology and d…
Guest Editorial
What are surfaces?" So much of life occurs at the surface that, as students of the human scene, we are obliged to pay far more attention to its character (subtlety, variety, and density) than we have done.The scholar's neglect and suspicion of surface phenomena is a consequence of a dichotomy in western thought between surface and depth, sensory appreciation and intellectual understanding, with bias against the first of the two terms
Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post-Washington Consensus
Over the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral agencies in order to understand the purchase of value chain approaches within the development field. Mixing GVC perspectives with other theoretical i…
Global Displacements
"Challenging the main ways we debate globalization, this book reveals how uneven geographies of capitalist development shape--and are shaped by--the aspirations and everyday struggles of people in the global South"
Feminist political economy in geography
Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo, NY
Global production networks and uneven development
This paper examines global production networks through the lens of uneven development. Although originally concerned with asymmetries in the global economy, in the 1990s, global production network studies shifted decidedly towards a focus upon realizing the mutual benefits of engagement between multinationals, their suppliers, and the regions where the latter were located. Recent trends in supply chain restructuring, thrown into sharp relief by t…
New Geographies of Uneven Development in Global Formation
The Doreen Massey Reader
Doreen Massey Critical Dialogues
Geographies of production I
Serial crises in the global economy have spurred renewed debate over contemporary transformations in geographies of uneven development. Global production network (GPN) studies have not been inured to this trend; indeed, in both geography and development sociology, a variety of approaches have emerged to grasp the multi-scaled, relational process of uneven development through the lens of global production. This progress report parses three of thes…
Keywords in Radical Geography
Will you be my mentor?’ Feminist mentoring at mid-career for institutional change
This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each other from cynicism and despair. Placing these experiences and dialogues in conversation with the ex…
International trade and the neoliberal diet in Central America and the Dominican Republic
Geographies of production II
As corporate power strains the liberal hegemony that has stabilized the globalization project, it is no wonder that scholars of global production are increasingly turning their attention to the role of the state. While the long-held assumption that the state primarily acted to facilitate capital’s priorities remains accurate, it is nonetheless incomplete. I discuss studies that focus on other state roles (regulator, buyer and producer) and pay pa…
Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration
While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case …
Economics (24 works) · Political science (23 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (13 works) · Geography (11 works) · Economic geography (10 works) · Market economy (10 works)