Research Teams

About NCGE

The North Carolina in the Global Economy project seeks to understand how globalization affects key traditional and rising industries in North Carolina. These industries play prominent roles in North Carolina's economy, and this website seeks to shed light on how global economic forces affect local development and employment.

The original version of the North Carolina in the Global Economy project was used as a research site for the Organizations and Global Competitiveness course at Duke University in Fall 2004, taught by Professor Gary Gereffi. The undergraduate students in the course conducted original research based on primary and secondary sources available on North Carolina. This site therefore began with the results of their substantial research efforts. Undergraduates enrolled in Prof. Gereffi's classes in subsequent years, up to and through spring 2007, have engaged in similar research on North Carolina's economy. For this 2007 version of the website, we began with this substantial data set and updated all tables, maps and charts with fresh data. Furthermore, and with financial support and substantial technical assistance offered by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology, this 2007 website features a redesign and reconfiguration of all industry value chains done in Flash and maps made possible by Google Earth. Both of these visualization tools have enabled the conversion of these vital features of data display from static to interactive.

Director

Gary Gereffi is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness at Duke University. His recent books include: Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton University Press, 1990); Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Praeger Publishers, 1994); The Value of Value Chains: Spreading the Gains from Globalisation (special issue of the IDS Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 3, July 2001); and Free Trade and Uneven Development: The North American Apparel Industry after NAFTA (Temple University Press, 2002). Gereffi is co-organizer of the Global Value Chains Initiative, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with John Humphrey (IDS, University of Sussex, UK) and Tim Sturgeon (MIT), and he is Director of the North Carolina in the Global Economy Project at Duke University.

E-mail: ggere@soc.duke.edu

2007 Project Coordinators

• Ryan Denniston
• Stacey Frederick
• Shawn Miller
• Gary Thompson
• Ryan Ong
• Joy Stutts

2007 Research Team

• Michelle Christian
• Jennifer Kim
• Andrew Kindman
• Lauren May
• Ben Sacchetti
• Craig Stephenson
• Aileen Zhang

Student Research on Industry Teams

Most of the original research for this Web site was compiled by Duke undergraduate students who were enrolled in Professor Gereffi's course on "Organizations and Global Competitiveness," taught at Duke University in the Fall semesters of 2004, 2006 and 2007. Team members assigned to the seven industries are indicated below:

North Carolina in the Global Economy - Website Teams

Funding

Funds and infrastructure support for the North Carolina in the Global Economy Project have been generously provided by the following units at Duke University: Markets & Management Studies Program, Sociology Department, Robert Thompson, Dean of Trinity College and John F. Burness, Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations. The updates and upgrades featured in this 2007 version were made possible by a visualization grant from Duke's Center for Instructional Technology given in Spring 2007 under the title, "Visualizing Economic Development: Value Chains and Mapping of U.S. and Global Employment and Trade Data."

Web site

The Web site was designed by Joy Stutts, and overall Web site support and content management was handled by Gary Thompson.