The global electronics industry is one of the most innovation-driven and
technology-intensive sectors in the contemporary world economy. From
semiconductors to end products, complex transnational production and
value-generating activities have integrated diverse macro-regions and
national economies worldwide into the "interconnected worlds" of global
electronics. This book argues that the current era of interconnected
worlds started in the early 1990s when electronics production moved from
systems dominated by lead firms in the United States, Western Europe,
and Japan towards increasingly globalized and cross-macro-regional
electronics manufacturing centered in East Asia. By the 2010s, this
co-evolution of production network complexity transformed global
electronics, through which lead firms from South Korea, Taiwan, and
China integrated East Asia into the interconnected worlds of electronics
production across the globe.
Drawing on literature on the electronics industry, new empirical
material comprising custom datasets, and extensive personal interviews,
this book examines through a "network" approach the co-evolution of
globalized electronics production centered in East Asia across different
national economies and sub-national regions. With comprehensive analysis
up to 2021, Yeung analyzes the geographical configurations ("where"),
organizational strategies ("how"), and causal drivers ("why") of global
production networks, setting a definitive benchmark into the dynamic
transformations in global electronics and other globalized industries.
The book will serve as a crucial resource for academic and policy
research, offering a conceptual, empirically driven grounding in the
theory of these networks that has become highly influential across the
social sciences.
