The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Supply Chains and the Human Condition
Abstract
This article theorizes supply chain capitalism as a model for understanding both the continent-crossing scale and the constitutive diversity of contemporary global capitalism. In contrast with theories of growing capitalist homogeneity, the analysis points to the structural role of difference in the mobilization of capital, labor, and resources. Here labor mobilization in supply chains is the focus, as it depends on the performance of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and citizenship status. The article uses the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilized within supply chains, and to point to the importance of tropes of management, consumption, and entrepreneurship in workers’ understandings of supply chain labor. These tropes make supply chains possible by bringing together self-exploitation and superexploitation. Diversity is thus structurally central to global capitalism, and not decoration on a common core.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In AI supply chains, racialized, national, and linguistic differences are actively mobilized to sort entrepreneurial subjects into hierarchies of value, blurring lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation.
“In AI supply chains, racialized, national, and linguistic differences are actively mobilized to sort entrepreneurial subjects into hierarchies of value, “blurring lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation” [126].”
From 'The plan is just survival': Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment (2026) · cites this paper as [126]
Diversifying and dispersing labor is what sustains supply chain capitalism.
“Again, we see how diversifying and dispersing labor is what sustains supply chain capitalism [126].”
From 'The plan is just survival': Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment (2026) · cites this paper as [126]
Arrangements in AI supply chains, shaped by race, gender, and nationality, normalize extreme wage differentials, rendering it acceptable to pay Kenyan data workers only a fraction of California rates.
“Such arrangements, shaped by race, gender, and nationality, normalize extreme wage differentials, rendering it acceptable, for example, to pay Kenyan data workers only a fraction of California rates [126].”
From 'The plan is just survival': Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment (2026) · cites this paper as [126]
Citations
Cites
Sweetness and power : the place of sugar in modern history
Roxborough, I., & Mintz, S. W. (1986) · Man · doi:10.2307/2803144 · Cited by 1,769
Other ModernitiesGendered Yearnings in China after Socialism
Rofel, L. (1999) · doi:10.1525/california/9780520210783.001.0001 · Cited by 781
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 49
- Anderson M., Blackness and indigeneity: Garifuna and the politics of race and culture in Honduras
- 10.1179/102452905X45382 · DOI
- Barry A., 1996, Foucault and political reason
- 10.1111/j.1471-0366.2006.00121.x · DOI
- 10.1111/j.1471-0366.2006.00128.x · DOI
- Bianco A., 2006, The bully of Bentonville: The high cost of Wal-Mart's everyday low prices
- 10.1080/1095760590934788 · DOI
- Chu J., Cosmologies of credit: Fuzhounese migration and the politics of destination, 10.1215/9780822393160 · DOI
- Collins J., 2003, Threads: Gender, labor, and power in the global apparel industry, 10.7208/chicago/9780226113739.001.0001 · DOI
- Ebron P., 2008, Recharting the black Atlantic, 319
- 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00216.x · DOI
- Ehrenreich B., 2001, Nickled and dimed: On (not) getting by in America
- Ferguson R., 2004, Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique
- Frank T., 1997, Commodify your dissent
- Freidberg S., 2004, French beans and food scares: Culture and commerce in an anxious age, 10.1093/oso/9780195169607.001.0001 · DOI
- Friedman T., 2005, The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century
- Gereffi G., 1994, Commodity chains and global capitalism
- Gereffi G., 2001, IDS Bulletin
- Gibson-Graham J. K., 1996, The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy
- Gibson-Graham J. K, 2006, A postcapitalist politics
- 10.1080/08935690701412794 · DOI
- Hampden-Turner C., 1993, The seven cultures of capitalism
- Haraway D., 2007, When species meet
- Hardt M., 2000, Empire
- Hardt M., 2004, Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire
- Hilton I., 2005, Granta, 89, 13
- Ho K., Liquefying the bull: Wall Street worldviews, corporate America, and the making of markets
- Hughes A., 2004, Geographies of commodity chains, 10.4324/9780203448694 · DOI
- Klein N., 2000, No logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies
- Korzeniewicz M., 1994, Commodity chains and global capitalism, 247
- Kothari , U. 2007 . Local production and global consumption . Presented at the Conference on Poverty and Capitalism, June, Manchester .
- 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00624.x · DOI
- Lichtenstein N., 2006, Wal-Mart: The face of twenty-first century capitalism
- Moreton , B. 2006 . The soul of the service economy: Wal-Mart and the making of Christian free enterprise, 1924–1994 . Ph.D. diss., Yale University . · DOI
- Ong A., 1987, Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: Factory women in Malaysia
- Ong A, 1999, Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality
- Oxfam, 2005, Trading away our rights: Women working in global supply chains
- Roediger D., 1999, The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class
- Rosen E. I., 2002, Making sweatshops: The globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, 10.1525/9780520928572 · DOI
- Ross R. J. S., 2004, Slaves to fashion: Poverty and abuse in the new sweatshops, 10.3998/mpub.15439 · DOI
- 10.1086/448612 · DOI
- Thrift N., 2005, Knowing capitalism, 10.4135/9781446211458 · DOI · Paper page
- Thompson E. P., 1966, The making of the English working class
- Tsing A., 2004, Friction: An ethnography of global connection
- Tsing A, Australian Journal of Anthropology
- Tsing A, Citizenship, rhetorics of security, and vernacular violence
- Watson J., 1997, Golden Arches east: McDonald's in East Asia
- Watts M., 2004, Geographies of commodity chains, 39
- Yanagisako S., 2002, Culture and capital: Producing Italian family capitalism
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Personalization and probabilities: Impersonal propensities in online grocery shopping
Mackenzie, A. (2018) · Big Data & Society · doi:10.1177/2053951718778310 · Cited by 31
'The plan is just survival': Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment
Kapania, S., Yang, T., Abdelkadir, N. A., Scheuerman, M. K., Miceli, M., Taylor, A. S., & Fox, S. E. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791097 · Cited by 2
“Anna Tsing’s scholarship on supply chain capitalism offers a productive lens to understand the structural role of difference in sustaining these global production networks [126].”
Influential
Metadata
- Authors
- Tsing, A.
- Corresponding author
- Tsing, Anna
- ORCID
- Tsing, Anna
- Venue
- Rethinking Marxism
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2009-04
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 148-176
- ISSN
- 0893-5696 (ISSN-L)
- 1475-8059
- OpenAlex
- W1997885649
- Cited by
- 980
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 62 · 2025: 106 · 2024: 120 · 2023: 98 · 2022: 109 · 2021: 111 · 2020: 71 · 2019: 95 · 2018: 87 · 2017: 33 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 21 · 2013: 24 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 21.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Rethinking Marxism (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Global trade, sustainability, and social impact
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
- Keywords
- supply chain, supply chain capitalism, global capitalism, diversity, difference, labor mobilization, pictorial representation, gender, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship status, self-exploitation, superexploitation, consumption, entrepreneurship
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
