Financialization and Value-based Control: Lessons from the Australian Mining Supply Chain

Abstract

Lead firms operate on multiple scales, and although their corporate functions may be globally organized, they are anchored in various territories through the formation of relations with local suppliers, some of whom have specialized knowledge, capabilities, or technologies that are essential to the lead firms’ business activities. Global value chain and global production network analyses have recognized that financialization is increasingly driving the way that lead firms coordinate their relationships with supplier firms. The contribution of this article is to unpack the mechanisms that lead firms adopt to govern their supply chains in the context of financialization and the implications this has for the territorial embeddedness of lead firms. The boom–bust cycle of mining, arising from massive fluctuations in global commodity prices, provides a revealing context in which to explore the changing agendas of financial markets and their implications for lead firm connections to territory. This article examines the mechanisms lead firms use to coordinate relations with local suppliers in the Queensland coal industry, which accounts for 50 percent of international trade in metallurgical coal and which has evolved in the context of the most recent boom–bust cycle of global coal prices.