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Neil M. Coe
University of Sidney
Neil joined the School of Geosciences in July 2022, after ten years in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, where he was Head of Department from 2012-18. Prior to that he spent twelve years in Geography at the University of Manchester. He is interested in the complex organizational forms that underpin economic globalization and their uneven geographical impacts. A central component of his work has been in collaboratively forging the Global Production Network (GPN) approach since the early 2000s. Recent work in this vein has sought to develop the original heuristic framework (GPN 1.0) into a more explanatory theory (GPN 2.0). Empirically, he has sought to explore economic globalization and GPNs through the lens of service sector dynamics, often under-studied in relation to agro-food and manufacturing industries such as garments, electronics and autos. His second main specialism are labour geographies. Early work on multi-scalar network approaches to innovation has been followed by a body of work on labour organization and agency, transnational and local labour markets, and labour regimes in global production. His current work is continuing to move in this direction, and he sees the intersections of global production, labour/work and environment as a critical nexus as we strive to achieve socially and environmentally sustainable production systems during a period of necessary energy transition.
MORE ABOUT NEIL M. COE >2020
Neil M. Coe
Logistical geographies
Although logistics are fundamentally geographical and of critical importance to contemporary society, it is only relatively recently that human geographers and cognate social scientists have started to meaningfully engage with the topic. This paper explores this recent growth of interest, which enco...
2019
Lone Riisgaard, Peter Lund-Thomsen, and Neil M. Coe
Multistakeholder initiatives in global production networks: naturalizing specific understandings of sustainability through the Better Cotton Initiative
In recent years, various academics, consultants, companies and NGOs have advocated a move towards more cooperative approaches to private sustainability standards to address the widely identified shortcomings of the compliance paradigm. However, is it possible to address these limitations by moving t...
2019
Neil M. Coe, Henry Wai-chung Yeung
Global production networks: mapping recent conceptual developments
In this framing paper for the special issue, we map significant research on global production networks during the past decade in economic geography and adjacent fields. In line with the core aim of the special issue to push for new conceptual advances, the paper focuses on the central elements of GP...
