“...the paper underlined how little communication there still is between social scientists working in different traditions and publishing in different languages”

At the time of publication of the paper, Global Commodity Chain analysis was a rapidly expanding research field in Anglophone academic circles—drawing from sociology, political economy, and international economics. Simultaneously, like-minded work had been ongoing in Francophone circles without Anglophone researchers paying much attention to it. The paper provided a comprehensive and critical review at a time when many researchers had just begun to explore new and exciting ways of studying the global economy and so needed guidance. The paper did not try to re-invent the wheel. It highlighted what was already available in the literature and provided suggestions on what to use it for.

The paper pointed out that one of the most useful ways to do research is to use insights from parallel literatures and deploy them within a new field. This can hardly be called a novelty, yet the paper underlined how little communication there still is between social scientists working in different traditions and publishing in different languages—e.g., Global Commodity Chain analysis is mostly employed in Anglophone social scientific environs, while filière analysis and convention theory are mainly employed in Francophone circles—yet they can be made to speak to each other in useful ways.

The world economy is a very dynamic and complex place. Africa is often portrayed as being excluded from the world economy altogether. Our experiences in the field suggested that the reality is more complex than that. In some places, and in some markets, it is getting more integrated into the world economy. In others, it is becoming more marginalized. The only way of providing a nuanced explanation was to look at one country and commodity at a time. In this paper, we examined two approaches for doing this and pointed out fruitful ways of combining them for ourselves and other researchers.

We were part of a newly created multi-disciplinary research group in Copenhagen that was put together to examine the changing role of Africa in the world economy. Publications resulted both within disciplinary traditions (political economy, economics, etc.) as well as synthesis work drawing on inputs form different disciplines. This paper was one of the outputs of the synthesis work. The three researchers co-authoring the article were a sub-set of the research group that joined forces in an attempt to provide a truly multi-disciplinary view on the potential of a rapidly expanding research field. The decision to work together was based on the complementarities of the skills we could deploy. The article was to a large extent the brainchild of Philip Raikes, an economist who read very widely in the social sciences and humanities, and who shortly after its publication lost a decade-long battle with cancer. The research fields covered in the article continues today under a different form in a research program examining the role of food safety and environmental standards as key determinants of international trade.