An overview of how graphic designers in India use global platforms.

Digital freelance platforms promise workers flexibility, independence, and access to a global labor market. But what does organizing and positioning oneself in this environment look like? Global Platform Work focuses on the everyday lives of graphic designers in India who use gig platforms to connect to a global client base. Drawing on interviews, observations, and photo diaries, Anna Oechslen describes how important it is for gig workers to constantly put themselves in a positive light, build relationships, and adapt to an ever-changing work environment. In doing so, she formulates gig work as making and sustaining relationships and sheds light on everyday practices that common understandings of work often leave unconsidered.
 

An empirical examination of the development pitfalls involving global value chains.

Are global value chains (GVCs) opportunity structures for economic upgrading, job creation, and poverty reduction? At least, this is what institutions like the World Bank suggest. However, the present book shows that this is not a tenable position—either on empirical or theoretical grounds. The study is conceived as an empirical ideology critique of the mainstream GVC approach, especially of its focus on upgrading as a development strategy. It is based on in-depth empirical research into upgrading strategies in Argentinian grain and oilseed value chains and their ramifications. Here, corporate actors organized along agribusiness value chains have demonstrated fairly successful trajectories of firm-level upgrading and, at the same time, employed the chain metaphor from the standpoint of specific business interests rather than a general development interest. Christin Bernhold devised the concept of “upgrading in and through class differentiation” to show how firm-level upgrading is based on, and at the same time re-shapes, class and power relations—shaping the uneven geographies of capitalism rather than eliminating them.