Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 196

One illustration of global commodity chains is the manufacture of the Barbie doll, the most profitable toy in history. The sixty-year-old teenage doll once sold at a rate of two per second, bringing the Mattel Corporation, based in Los Angeles, USA, over $1 billion in annual revenues (Tempest 1996). Although in its early years the doll sold mainly in the USA, Europe and Japan, today Barbie can be found in more than 150 countries around the world (Dockterman 2016). To avoid relatively high labour costs, Barbie has never been manufactured in the United States (Lord 2020). The first doll was made in Japan in 1959 when wages there were lower than the US, but later manufacture moved to other low-wage countries in Asia. The manufacture of Barbie illustrates a great deal about global commodity chains.

Barbie is designed in Mattel’s California headquarters, where marketing and advertising strategies are also devised and most of the profits are made, but the physical product has always sourced its various elements from all over the world.

Tempest (1996) reported that, in the late 1990s, Barbie’s body was made from oil produced in Saudi Arabia and refined there into ethylene, which Taiwan’s Formosa Plastic Corporation converted into PVC pellets. The pellets were then shipped to one of the four Asian factories – two in southern China, one in Indonesia and one in Malaysia. The plastic mould injection machines that shape the body were made in the USA and shipped out to the factories. Barbie’s nylon hair came from Japan and her cotton dresses were made in China with Chinese cotton (the only raw material to come from the country where most of the dolls were made). Nearly all the material used in the manufacture was then shipped into Hong Kong and on to factories in China by truck. The finished dolls left by the same route, with 23,000 trucks making the daily trip between Hong Kong and southern China’s toy factories. More recently, Noah (2012: 100) argues that ‘The same pattern persists today, but the volume and technological sophistication of today’s “Made in China” products are much greater.’

As for Barbie, sales fell by 6 per cent in 2013, but by 2019 were rising again, up 12 per cent in the fourth quarter of the year (Whitten 2019). This follows diversification of the traditionally slim, blonde-haired, white original version. Barbie is now available in a range of skin tones and body shapes (‘petite’, ‘tall’ and a ‘curvy body’ that reflects the influence of global celebrities such as Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian) and in a variety of employmentbased outfits, including a space suit (Kumar 2019). With a live-action movie in the next stage, who would bet against Barbie appearing in the tenth edition of this book?

Barbie literally embodies global commodity chains.

What Barbie production and consumption shows us is the effectiveness of globalization in connecting the world’s economies. However, it also demonstrates the unevenness of globalization, which enables some countries to benefit at the expense of others. We cannot assume that global commodity chains will inevitably promote rapid economic development across the chain of societies involved.