Paper short abstract:

The influence of national and local social and institutional context in shaping labour agency remains under-explored in GPN research. Through investigating the Greek and South African fruit sectors, we explore the role of embeddedness on labour agency in production networks.

Paper long abstract:

The expansion of global production networks (GPNs) has led to major shifts in export horticulture. The emerging literature on labour agency in GPNs explores how workers respond to commercial pressures to improve their working conditions. Although the GPN framework's concept of embeddedness accounts for the influence of national and local social and institutional context in shaping labour agency, this remains an under-explored avenue of research. This paper seeks to address this gap through the following research question: how do the tensions between commercial pressures and societal relations play out in different contexts, and what are the implications for different forms of labour agency in fruit production networks? The paper seeks to answer this research question through the case studies of the South African and Greek fruit export sectors. A comparative case study highlights how the different context shapes the ability (or not) of labour to challenge the commercial dynamics of global production networks. The paper argues that different national and local configurations facilitate/challenge the ability of actors to exercise agency through opening up opportunities for certain forms of agency, while disabling others.