Research
My research is highly interdisciplinary, but journal quality is difficult to compare across disciplines. I’m a trained political scientist, so in order to facility cross-disciplinary comparison, I benchmark my peer-reviewed articles to the flagship journal of political science, the American Political Science Review, based on IMPACT FACTOR and JOURNAL RANKING, with data drawn from Journal Citation Reports.
American Political Science Review (flagship journal in political science):
2022 Impact Factor: 6.8; 5-year impact: 8.5; Rank by JCR: 5/315 (Political Science)
“Collaboration and Social Capital in Meta-Organizations: Bonding or Bridging?”
2024 Technology Analysis & Strategic Management
- — 2022 Impact Factor: 3.5, 5-year Impact Factor: 3.4
- — 2022 Rank by JCI: Management: 186/401
with Jing-Ming Shiu and Hui-Hsuan Huang(Cheng Kung University, Taiwan)
ABSTRACT: How do firms collaborate to achieve their strategic goals within inter-organizational settings? Inter-firm collaboration is a double-edge sword – it helps firms to obtain external resources, but it also increases risks of knowledge spillovers with competitors. Normally, spillover risks are reduced through formal contracting. However, meta-organizations, like standard-setting organizations, lack formal contracts, meaning that firms often rely on social capital to offset transaction costs and opportunism. This paper applies theories of social capital to explain inter-firm collaboration within the meta-organizational environment of 3GPP (Third Generational Partnership Project) – the primary global mobile telecommunications standard-setting organization. It utilizes a stochastic actor-based model and a comprehensive collaboration dataset from the 3G to 4G eras to examine the mechanism of collaboration. We find that firms are more likely to choose partner firms based on the ‘bonding’ view of social capital, rather than the ‘bridging’ view. The paper advances research on collaboration mechanism within meta-organization, while also contributing to social capital theory in emphasizing the importance of the bonding view of social capital under conditions when no formal contracts are available.
2023 Technological Forecasting & Social Change Vol. 189
- — 2021 Impact Factor: 10.884, 5-year Impact Factor: 10.408
- — 2021 Rank by JCI: Business: 9/296; Reg’l & Urban Planning: 1/53
with Jing-Ming Shiu and Hui-Hsuan Huang(Cheng Kung University, Taiwan)
Abstract: Meta-organizations are assemblages of autonomous formal organizations with a central goal, but which lack typical instruments of formal authority, like contracts and equity. In this organizational context, how do firms establish informal authority to access other firms’ resources and thereby achieve their private strategic goals? Using a novel application of resource dependence theory, this paper applies stochastic actor-based model to examine how firms’ informal authority is established and evolves to achieve their strategic goals within the Third Generational Partnership Project (3GPP), the primary global mobile telecommunications standard-setting organization. By using a comprehensive dataset of interfirm collaboration over the 3G and 4G generations, our analysis shows that firms tend to establish mutual dependencies by selecting collaborators who possess social capital (high reputations), but avoid collaborators with political capital (high status) within the interorganizational collaboration network. This research provides new insights into how meta-organizations are internally organized through informal authority, while also extending resource dependence theory to the network-level. It also advances our understanding of the formation of mutual dependencies from an actor-based perspective in an interorganizational collaboration network.
“Power in Consensus: Legitimacy, Global Value Chains and Inequality in Telecommunications Standard-setting”
2023 Global Networks
- — 2021 Impact Factor: 1.968; 5-year Impact Factor: 3.000
- — 2021 Rank by JCI: Geography: 30/168; Sociology: 61/211; Anthro: 24/135
with Jing-Ming Shiu (Cheng Kung University, Taiwan)
ABSTRACT: Power is central to GVC research, but the concept is usually restricted to ‘direct’ market power that generates rents. This paper examines ‘diffuse’ conceptualizations of power in GVCs that focus on social construction, arguing that they exist along a continuum from ‘fractured’ to ‘encompassing.’ Then, empirically, it shows how different types of power intermix in telecommunications standard-setting from 1999-2021, using a comprehensive dataset of every finalized work item in 3GPP. Given the centrality of interoperability and network effects in telecommunications, the industry is ripe for monopolistic rents and unequal value capture on a global scale. However, these are attenuated by a layering of power relations, and particularly, an intermediary form of social construction – legitimacy – which we argue is the primary driver of telecommunications standard-setting, and a new type of constitutive power in GVC analysis, alongside governmentality and hegemony. This is illustrated by focusing on two major shifts in legitimacy in 3GPP – the rise of Huawei and network operators. Ultimately, the paper shows how power becomes layered with collective forms of power partially neutralizing inter-firm forms of dyadic power, which attenuates monopolistic value capture.
“Power and Inequality in Global Value Chains: Advancing the Research Agenda”
2023 Global Networks
- — 2021 Impact Factor: 1.968; 5-year Impact Factor: 3.000
- — 2021 Rank by JCI: Geography: 30/168; Sociology: 61/211; Anthro: 24/135
with Jennifer Bair (U. of Virginia) and Stefano Ponte (Copenhagen Business School)
ABSTRACT: Power is a central, but largely undertheorized, concept for scholars of global value chains (GVCs). In this introduction to a special issue on power and inequality in GVCs, the authors summarize the key insights from the articles gathered here and explain how the collection advances our understanding of the types and forms of power operating in GVCs and their effect on different dimensions of inequality.
World Bank (2022) “Massive Modularity: Understanding Industry Organization in the Digital Age”
with Eric Thun (Oxford), Daria Taglioni (World Bank) & Timothy Sturgeon (MIT) 
Abstract: Digitization is transforming the organization and geography of industries. Once digitized, information can be generated, collected, stored, monitored, analyzed, and processed in ways not previously possible, and when common standards are used as modular interfaces, data can be transferred and put to use with greater ease across organizations and geographic space. An important effect of digitization on industrial organization is the emergence of global-scale modular ecosystems associated with specific classes of products, applications, and technologies. The modules and sub-systems in these ecosystems can—albeit with significant engineering effort, because they are complex—be reused, connected, and layered to drive innovation and deliver products and services with immense complexity at scale. The nuances of this transformation have not been lost on the field of technology management and innovation. The primary focus of this literature has been on how to capture value in modular ecosystems, mainly by focusing on how to companies can influence or leverage industry architectures and “win” in an era of digital platforms. This paper makes three contributions to these literatures, as well as to literatures on global value chains (GVCs), industry standards, and industrial policy in the post- “Washington Consensus” era: 1) it develops a broader view of modular and platform ecosystems than has been advanced so far, highlighting the overlapping and layered nature of digital industry ecosystems; 2) it focuses on the multiplicity of standards that bind modular ecosystems together; and 3) it draws attention to the geographic and geopolitical implications of what it calls Massive Modular Ecosystems (MMEs). The case study of the mobile phone handset industry reveals three paradoxes associated with MMEs: 1) they allow for extremely complex products to be produced at scale, unlike more traditional industries; 2) they simultaneously feature high degrees of market concentration at the level of complex sub-systems and components, and market fragmentation at the level of the industry overall and at the level of complementors; and 3) they are concentrated in geographic clusters, but because MMEs integrate work carried out in many specialized clusters in many countries, the system as a whole is geographically dispersed. This leads to a fourth, policy-related paradox: MMEs generate strategic and geopolitical pressures for decoupling when placed under stress, but the same set of circumstances also creates pressures for maintaining the business relationships and institutions that have come to underpin global integration.
2022 Congressional Testimony: U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission
Watch the video of the Hearing here. 
My panel runs from around 20:00 to 2:00:00.
2021 World Development — Special Issue on COVID-19, Vol. 139
- — 2021 Impact Factor: 6.678, 5-year Impact Factor: 7.324
- — 2021 Rank by JCI: Development Studies: 4/60; Economics: 29/572
With Rory Horner (U. of Manchester) & Lantian Li (Northwestern)
Abstract – Shortages of critical medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic have turned global value chains (GVCs) in personal protective equipment (PPE) into a political lightning rod. Some blame excessive outsourcing and foreign dependency for causing shortages, thus urging greater state intervention; others applaud GVCs for their flexibility and scaling up of production, while blaming states for undermining GVC operations. Using policy process-tracing and monthly trade data of seven PPE products across the US, Europe, China and Malaysia, this paper goes beyond the binary debate of either the ‘failure’ or ‘success’ of GVCs to show when and under what conditions states interacted with GVCs to produce mixed outcomes in provisioning countries with PPEs. We identify interactions between the type of state intervention and two key structural features of GVCs – geographic distribution of production and technological attributes of the product. Conceptually, the paper demonstrates the mutual constraints of states and GVCs, and highlights structural factors involved in the relationship. Looking to the future of GVCs, we caution against wholesale declarations that GVCs should be abandoned or maintained, instead concluding that paying attention to GVC structure, states and their interactions are crucial.
“Power in Global Value Chains” (PDF) (Review of International Political Economy) ** Nominated for “Best Theory Paper” by Academy of International Business 2019 Review of International Political Economy, Vol 26:4, pp.666-694.
- — 2020 Impact Factor: 4.659; 5-year Impact Factor: 5.575
- — 2020 Rank by JCI: Political Science: 26/295; International Relations: 10/147
With Stefano Ponte (Copenhagen Business School) & Timothy J. Sturgeon (MIT)
ABSTRACT – Power has been a foundational concept in global value chain (GVC) research. Yet, in most GVC scholarship, power is not explicitly defined and is applied as a unitary concept, rather than as having multiple dimensions. Clarifying the concept of power has become particularly urgent in recent years as GVC research has proliferated beyond dyads of transacting firms or firm-state linkages and incorporated other stakeholders and mechanisms such as NGOs, labor unions, standards, norms and conventions. In this article, we propose a typology for the varied meanings and usages of power in GVC governance. We delineate two principal dimensions: transmission mechanisms – direct and diffuse; and arena of actors – dyads and collectives. Combined, these two dimensions yield four ideal types of power in GVC governance: bargaining, demonstrative, institutional and constitutive. We offer brief illustrations of these four types of power and provide an agenda for further research in the field.
“Governance and Power in Global Value Chains” (PDF) with Stefano Ponte and Timothy J. Sturgeon
Chapter 6 in Handbook of Global Value Chains, 2019, pp 120-137
With Stefano Ponte (Copenhagen Business School) & Timothy J. Sturgeon (MIT)
Abstract: Global value chain (GVC) analysis draws on international political economy, development studies, economic geography and economic sociology to provide insight into the transnational organization of economic activities and how these interact with local actors and institutions to shape development processes. GVCs in specific industries tend to be “governed,” more or less explicitly, by identifiable sets of “lead firms” that select suppliers, place orders, set requirements, and sometimes tightly coordinate the activities of suppliers and affiliated companies. This approach to GVC governance has provided rich insights into the emergence of spatially dispersed yet centrally coordinated production and distribution networks. As important as firm-level actors and their inter-relationships are, it is evident that actors, institutions, and norms external to the value chain also shape GVCs governance, for example through regulation, lobbying, civil society campaigns, and third-party standard setting. Institutional actors, including states and multilateral institutions shape GVCs by providing a mechanism for signatories to enforce, or not enforce, regulations and a platform for negotiating the terms of international trade agreements. Workers can also influence governance, especially when they are represented by labour unions with the ability to negotiate the terms of employment or call work stoppages at the level of the enterprise, industry, or broader economy. To provide an expanded analytical toolkit for this expanding field of inquiry, we offer a typology of power in GVCs along two dimensions: the arena of actors (dyads and collectives) and the precision of power (direct and diffuse). This yields four main forms of power: bargaining (dyadic and direct), demonstrative (dyadic and diffuse), institutional (collective and direct) and constitutive (collective and diffuse). This typology can help isolate various forms of power, and how they layer, evolve, consolidate and diffuse through distinct mechanisms and trajectories in view of better understanding how are GVCs governed, and with what distributional effects.
“International Trade as ‘Footloose’ and Firm-Organized: The Fragmentation of Production in China and a Transactional Trade Approach to Global Value Chains” (PDF) (Under Review)
Abstract: The fragmentation of international production through outsourcing and offshoring raises a host of problems in our ability to conceptualize and measure international trade. Standard trade theory, newer firm heterogeneity literatures and a heterodox literature on global value chains (GVC) offer contending conceptualizations and methodologies. Utilizing a unique Chinese transactional trade database, which records every import and export transaction of every firm in China, this paper finds substantial empirical support for GVC theories that international trade is “driven” by powerful lead firms that coordinate networks of suppliers into distinct trade channels. However, since GVC theories have grown out of firm-level case studies and fieldwork methodologies, they suffer from a micro-macro aggregation problem. This paper helps in overcoming these empirical limitations, builds bridges to other trade theories, estimates the aggregate shares of GVC-organized trade, and raises questions about the foundations of China’s manufacturing and export prowess.
Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an extraordinary increase in the share of foreign direct investment (FDI) going to developing countries, and political scientists have taken notice. Research has focused on institutional factors, in particular their importance in establishing credible commitments. However, in focusing on institutions, the investors themselves – the multinational enterprises (MNEs) – are largely ignored. This is because the literature models and measures FDI as bilateral economic flows between countries, rather than conceptualizing it as networks of actors, with strategies, goals and the capacity to organize international production. We are missing half the story. This paper focuses on China, the most successful, large developing country FDI host in absolute terms and relative to its large economy. In the general and China-specific FDI literatures alike, China presents a string of anomalies in both aggregate inward FDI and when it is decomposed, including unusual allocations across industries, MNE modes of entry and by country of origin. Almost without exception, China’s domestic institutions serve as the principal explanations, including ones based on credible commitments. This paper reconsiders these anomalies through the lens of MNE organization – specifically, their fragmentation of international production through vertically specialized production networks. Using disaggregated and nested data of industries, sub-industries, firms and a unique database of millions of individual trade transactions, the paper re-constructs Chinese FDI and trade data to uncover very consistent patterns of inward FDI that reveals an underlying MNE organizational logic in the restructuring of East Asian production, for which institutional arguments and market forces are unable to account. More importantly, in contrast to institutional accounts which offer diverse explanations for the anomalies, a MNE organizational approach parsimoniously offers leverage across them. By examining the international economy through the reconstruction of disaggregated national data, we can learn something about China, East Asia and the organization of the international economy.
2015 Review of International Political Economy, Vol 22:5, pp. 875-909
- — 2017 Impact Factor: 4.659; 5 year Impact Factor: 5.575
- — 2017 Rank by JCI: Political Science: 18/289; International Relations: 7/136
Abstract: Over the past several decades, firms have de-verticalized and internationalized increasingly complex manufacturing and service functions, a phenomenon studied across the social sciences. However, the disciplines disagree over whether the fragmentation of production is substantively novel, requiring amendments to trade theory, or is simply a secular deepening of the international division of labor. Some economists view it as “just trade,” driven by well-known actor-less determinants, such as factor endowments, technology, and returns to scale, while more recent firm heterogeneity trade theories consider firm behavior. By contrast, other heterodox social science approaches differ by focusing on the strategic actions of firms and sector-specific governance as independent drivers which “govern” trade and determine the division of value between countries. This paper develops novel measurements by utilizing unique transactional trade data – the raw firm-level trade transactions that comprise standard inter-country trade statistics – on 439 of China’s largest exporters in eighteen sub-sectors of the electronics and light industries, to examine whether trade is heterogeneously governed in ways theorized by the global value chains (GVC) literature. It finds substantial empirical support for GVC-governed trade, and advances both GVC and firm-centric trade theory along several fronts.
“International Fragmented Production: Conceptualization, Theory and Measurement across Disciplines” (PDF) (Under Review)
Abstract: International fragmented production – the de-verticalization, de-agglomeration and internationalization of firms and industries – poses serious challenges to our ability to accurately conceptualize and measure the international economy. Studied across many disciplines, including economics, geography, international business and sociology, it has generated a variety of empirical and conceptual approaches, oftentimes incongruous, and each with its own policy implications. Due to inter-disciplinary differences and infrequency of communication, there has been no explicit attempt either to delineate the principal junctures of differentiation between literatures, or the emerging areas of overlap and collaboration. This paper identifies three important analytic dimensions by which international fragmentation is differentiated in conceptualization, theory, data collection and measurement: the status of firms, industrial sector organization, and the scope of inter-firm relationships. It finds many important instances of disciplinary literatures relaxing underlying assumptions and adapting new methodologies, thereby opening important areas of unacknowledged inter-disciplinary convergence and allowing for a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.
“Cloth without a Weaver: Power, Emergence and Institutions across Global Value Chains” (PDF)
2014 Economy and Society, 43(3), pp. 315-345.
- — 2017 Impact Factor: 2.542, 5-year Impact Factor: 2.511
- — 2017 Rank by JCI: Sociology: 35/198; Economics: 61/534
Abstract: In studies of the fragmentation and internationalization of production, most value chain approaches consider the inter-firm balance of power as the critical dynamic in development. With the firm as the primary unit of analysis, research long held out two promises: first, bridging the ‘micro-macro gap’ in development theory, meaning making valid inferences from micro-level actors (firms) to macro-sociological outcomes; and second, reconciling its firm-level organizational approach with institutionalism. This paper argues, first, that the literature is artificially constrained in bridging the micro-macro gap due to its delimited conceptualization of ‘power,’ based on the ‘agentic-strategic’ behavior of firms. It argues for broadening the notion of power to bridge the levels of analysis, based on the concept of ‘emergence.’ Second, while institutional critics are correct in criticizing value chain scholarship for its neglect, this paper finds that the effects of institutions are not as consistent or determinative as suggested, and hence, it seeks to expand the scope for incorporating institutionalism. These points are illustrated through an intra-industry comparative study of three textile agro-industries in China.
2014 World Development Vol. 57, pp.47-62.
- — 2017 Impact Factor: 3.166, 5-year Impact Factor: 3.940
- — 2017 Rank by JCI: Development Studies: 3/56; Economics: 31/534
Abstract: Utilizing Chinese industrial data and detailed transactional trade data, this paper finds two paradoxes. First, the distribution of FDI across value chains in light industries is the opposite of many extant explanations. Second, China’s dominance as an exporter is belied by the weaknesses of its domestic firms within the governance of value chains, with important implications for firm upgrading. By analyzing millions of US Customs Bureau trade transactions, the paradoxes are resolved by examining intermediary contractors in East Asian value chains. Even thirty years after reforms began and in the technologically simplest industries, Chinese firms continue to struggle to break through substantial ‘contractual’ barriers to entry.
An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis in Evaluating the Overall Efficiency of Firms’ Marketing Decision-Making (with Wang Zhaohua and Yin Jianhua)
2007 Journal of Systems Science and Information Vol. 5:3, pp. 1-11. (Chinese journal)
Articles in Edited Volumes
2011. “Two Tales of Agro-Industrial Transformation: State Capacity in China’s and India’s Textile Industries” in Industrial Dynamics in China and India: Firms, Clusters and Different Growth Paths, edited by Moriki Ohara, M. Vijayabaskar and Hong Lin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009.
“The Agro-Industrial Development of Post-Reform China and India: A Comparative Look along the Textile Production Chain” in Comparing Development Trajectories of the Chinese and Indian Textile Industry, edited by Moriki Ohara and Yoko Asuyama. Chiba, Japan: Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization. 2009.
“Contradictions and Catalysts: The Dynamic between China’s Agricultural and Industrial Reforms” (with Lin Hong) in Comparing Development Trajectories of the Chinese and Indian Textile Industry, edited by Moriki Ohara and Yoko Asuyama. Chiba, Japan: Institute of Developing Economies.
Research Reports
2013. “State Capacity in China’s and India’s Textile Industries,” in Industrial Dynamics in India and China: Comparing the Growth Processes of Indigenous Firms and Clusters,RINDAS International Symposium, Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan.
2008. “Boom and Bust: the First Wave of Industrialization in China’s Post-Reform Textile and Apparel Industries.” IDE-JETRO China-India Comparative Industrialization Project.
2004. “The Chinese Economy in Global Markets and Its Future Challenges.” Global Business Network, a Member of the Monitor Group.
Book Reviews
2012. Review of Vu Tuong, Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China and Indonesia, in the Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 12, Issue 1, pp. 156-158.
2010. Review of Edward Friedman and Bruce Gilley, eds. Asia’s Giants: Comparing China and India in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp.119.
