Un)fashionable Entanglements: Development, Workers' Movements and Regulation in Global Garment Value

5 credits · Undergraduate

Fashion and garment production is an old trade, and it is one of Italy's most important sectors in terms of global prestige, cultural effervescence, and exportation. Fashion entangles creativity, culture, style, and ways of life. At the same time, garment production entails complex and globalized manufacturing processes that tie together segmented labor forces with differentiated levels of work quality, rights, and regions embedded in the world economy in diverse positions and at different levels of their developmental path. Garment manufacturing is an industry forerunner in terms of productive globalization, and it is considered a starter industrial sector for economically underdeveloped regions. Early on, it presented signs of technological revolutions, the growing role of intangible assets over production, and the restructuring dynamics of production in complex, globalized and functionally integrated value chains. The sector, therefore, serves as a guide and a lens to scrutinize wide-ranging phenomena and to engage with broader theoretical debates. By analyzing the garment/fashion complex, it is possible to study globalizing production and consumption processes, the role of decent work in global production networks, and the crucial issues of economic development and transnational regulations. This course focuses on the literature that deals with garment production in Global Value Chains and explores different analytical approaches in between the theoretical traditions of economic and labor sociology and international political economy. The focus on garments allows students to deepen their knowledge of related and wider issues such as theories of development, feminist political economy, analyses of labor organizations, and the regulations for decent work across national boundaries. The course, therefore, touches upon issues of gendered exploitative mechanisms at work, labor control and surveillance, theories of labor agency and movements within the workplace and across national boundaries, as well as theories of private and public global governance for labor standards. While the course is global in its analytical scope, it pays specific attention to European and especially Italian dynamics. Readings on Italian case studies and current events are presented in almost all the weekly topics and two thematic units are dedicated entirely to an analysis of garment production processes in Prato and in Southern Italy.