Reshaping the organizational structure in the global economy: Evidence from the U.S. furniture industry

The increasing forces of globalization and competition are forcing developed-country firms to review their boundaries and organizational structure. Gereffi (2005) identified three main aspects of modern world trade relevant to the analysis of global organization of production. These are: 1) the increase of intra-industry trade in intermediate inputs; 2) the ability of producers to “slice up the value chain” (Krugman 1995) ; 3) the rise of a number of global production networks that points out the change in the governance structures and the distribution of gains in the global economy. In recent years, the analysis of the social and organizational structure of the global economy and its dynamics has been at the core of an emerging discipline, named global value chains (GVCs). This perspective, whose formal conceptualization is generally attributed to Gereffi’s 2001 and Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon’s 2005, aims at addressing the complexity of evolving global industries by investigating the distribution of roles, commitments and gains along global production networks. According to the original means, the adoption of a distinct typology of governance––out of the 5 the authors hypothesized––depends on the interaction between three transaction variables, namely: i) the complexity of transactions; ii) the ability to codify transactions; iii) the capabilities available in the supply-base