The Political Economy of Value: What Wine Tells Us about Contemporary Capitalism

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In this open access book, Stefano Ponte offers a theoretically ambitious, empirically rich interrogation of the notions of value at play in global value chains, using the international wine industry as an exemplar, that ultimately amounts to a new and fundamental critique contemporary capitalism and the inequalities it engenders.

Unlike existing work that takes the value in global value chains for granted, this study explicitly engages with processes of value creation, appropriation and redistribution and the different forms of power that underpin them. These dynamics take place through a variety of material, symbolic and experiential undertakings that combine tangible and intangible content. Value, Ponte shows, is not only embedded in the physical manifestations of convenience, taste, texture and intrinsic quality but also through immaterial content, such as branding, singularity or geographic origin of products and the experiences they are connected to, such as gastronomic tourism.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and organized into a three-part structurethe first of which lays the theoretical groundwork, the second of which provides empirically rich analysis of winescapes in South Africa and Italy, and the third of which draws out conclusions for other food and agriculture industriesthis book explains how power is exercised in contemporary capitalism, by whom, and with what consequences for producers, workers, and nature, both in the Global South and the Global North.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark (Social Sciences and Business).

Author Bio

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Centre for Competition, Regulation, and Economic Development at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His previous books include The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (Zed, 2005, with Benoit Daviron); Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy (2005, with Peter Gibbon); Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (2011, with Lisa Ann Richey); and Business, Power, and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains (Zed, 2019).