This continual focus on the economic and development outcome of GPNs in the global
economy points us to another epistemological challenge – the broadening of the GPN
framework to incorporate varieties of capitalism into its analytical orbit. A significant body
of literature in comparative international political economy has confirmed that the economic
organization of capitalism varies across different countries and regions (Whitley, 1999; Hall
and Soskice, 2001). Again, the intellectual foundations of the GPN framework in microsociological
network analysis and macro-GCC/GVC frameworks do not provide a readymade
solution to this epistemological problem. In the former literature, capitalism is clearly
too much a structural phenomenon to be accounted for. In the latter framework, capitalism
remains essentially as the backdrop through which GCCs/GVCs operate seamlessly. This
relative silence on one of the most significant issues in contemporary social science poses a
serious challenge to the GPN analysis. Put simply, how does the GPN framework account for
the fact that despite the ability of lead firms in GPNs to enrol virtually all economies in the
world into their activities, there remains a persistent divergence in different national
economies in terms of business and industrial organizations, institutional structures, and
levels of articulation into the global economy? These significant and, yet, persistent
differences in the economic organization of capitalisms need to be theorized successfully in
future epistemological development of the GPN framework for it to be a much more potent