Competition & Change

The ‘financialization of everyday life’ is a concept widely recognized by academics as an increasingly fundamental way of understanding the impact of neoliberal ideologies and financial processes on individual identities, subjectivities and relationships with financial services. This article contributes to debates on the consumption of sub-prime credit and calls for a sophisticated analysis of this aspect of financialization to take into account the variegated use of financial services and use of credit by people on low and moderate incomes. Drawing on qualitative analysis of the ‘lived experience’ of financialization, based on rigorous in-depth interviews with 44 low/middle income borrowers in the United Kingdom the article concludes that: individuals are at risk of financial insecurity due to increasing variegation of credit markets, and; that the binaries of ‘super inclusion’/’relic’ financial ecologies fail to reflect the complexity and variegation of credit use in contemporary society as a result of financialization.

Offshoring, understood as the geographical relocation of companies’ activities to another country, is a key feature of contemporary globalization and has growing social, political and economic implications. However, the phenomenon remains poorly examined at aggregated macro levels such as the national or regional level. Most macro analyses are based on proxies and trade statistics with limitations. Drawing on unique Danish survey data, this article demonstrates how survey data can provide important insights into the national scale and impacts of offshoring, including changes of employment, which are difficult to measure with other methods.

This article aims to develop a model of competitive intelligence in the case of North African small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Specifically, its objective is to analyse the mediating and moderating effects of innovation and the protection of information assets and the international competitiveness of SMEs based on export intensity. The results show that the relationship between business intelligence and the international competitiveness of SMEs is both mediated and moderated by innovation and the protection of information assets. The originality of this research lies in the design of a competitive intelligence model that integrates business intelligence in terms of the mediation and moderation effects of innovation and the protection of information assets and international competitiveness.

The aerospace industry in Mexico has been growing significantly in recent years. This study seeks to determine the productive and organizational capabilities of multinational aerospace enterprises that are developing in the Baja California region, in northern Mexico, especially for the particular way in which they are joining the Global Value Chain. Undoubtedly, this is related to the way in which the industrial regions of developing countries are integrated into the global value chain by multinational corporations. Data for the analysis come mainly from ProMexico, a Mexican federal agency. According to results, at the present time Baja California aerospace industry integrates to the industry global value chains in the low steps, similar to what happens in other sectors and other regions around the country. Baja California activity specialized in manufacturing producing of parts or components for other foreign companies, which in turn are the ones that actually develop the aircraft’s systems and subsystems.

This article critically examines how the concept of value has been understood in Global Value Chains analysis. In particular, it is argued that the Global Value Chains literature has largely overlooked the political and contested nature of the concept by relying on conventional understandings of value borrowed from mainstream economics and Business Studies. This article reconsiders the notion of value and its role within Global Value Chains analysis using insights offered by decolonial and critical authors. It argues that value should be understood, not only as narrow pecuniary gains, but also as a broader philosophical question regarding the justice and purpose of productive activity. It proposes the new concept of ‘voice upgrade’ as a tool to appreciate the extent to which different formal and informal institutional settings in global value chains allow for democratic negotiations about value.