Seminar: "Value struggles: Looking at capitalism through the wine glass" by Stefano Ponte

Stefano Ponte, from the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, will visit ICTA-UAB to give a public seminar.

Seminar: "Value struggles: Looking at capitalism through the wine glass"

Speaker: Stefano Ponte, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

• Date: Thusday, June 12th, 2025
• Time: From 2.30pm to 4.30pm
• Venue: Sala Montseny (room z/022 & z/023) ICTA-UAB

There is no better product than wine to unmask some of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Wine is one of the most fragmented and diversified industries, and one that is not yet completely dominated by large corporate interests. It is also where all sorts of antagonisms against the power of capital are taking place. The expansion of uniform and branded offerings is counterbalanced by alternative discourses and practices valorising how place, nature and craft can deliver a range of different wines. At the same time, viticulture often comes at the cost of biodiversity and the exploitation of gendered and racialized labour.

Stefano Ponte’s forthcoming book Value struggles: Looking at capitalism through the wine glass shows how these tensions and contradictions play out within three sites of struggle: place, nature and people (class, race and gender). The book examines how different ‘worlds of valuation’ are leveraged by specific groups of actors to maintain existing power imbalances or to attempt to challenge them. Through a detailed analysis of South African and Italian wine, it shows that predatory accumulation is about extracting value not only from labour, but also from place, nature and people’s identities as owners of tangible and intangible assets. Value struggles provides a poignant example of how power is exercised in contemporary capitalism and explains the consequences for producers, workers and nature – both in the global South and the global North.

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School, where he teaches on governance and sustainable development, international business and politics, and global value chains. He is happiest at work when doing fieldwork along agricultural and food value chains from production to retail, but particularly at trade fairs, on coffee farms in East Africa, and in vineyards and wine cellars in Italy and South Africa. Stefano is the author or editor of eleven other books – including Contested sustainability: The political ecology of conservation and development partnerships in Tanzania (edited collection, with Christine Noe and Daniel Brockington), Business, power and sustainability in a world of global value chains, and Brand aid: Shopping well to save the world (with Lisa Ann Richey). He is currently a co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy.