Recently, most capitalist economies in the Global North have experienced a decline in manufacturing and an increase in the service sector. Meanwhile, there has been substantial manufacturing growth in the Global South. This book explores why these changes have occurred and the best way to understand how the contemporary economy functions.

Ray Hudson is a political-economic geographer at Durham University, UK, where he has been a Professor since 1990. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Academy of the Social Sciences, the Royal Geographical Society and the Regional Studies Association as well as a member of Academia Europaea.

1. Setting the scene: conceptualising capitalist economies as co-produced. 2. Making co-production possible: from state regulation to informal institutions, conventions and habits. 3. Enabling co-production: managing relations between capital and labour. 4. Competition among co-producing firms: varying forms of competitive strategy. 5. Collaboration among firms: collaborating and co-producing with some in order to compete with others. 6. People collaborating and competing for waged work in the co-producing economy. 7. Engaging consumers in the co-production of commodities. 8. Capital and nature: from relations of domination to active co-production. 9. Co-producing sustainable economies or the end of capitalism as we knew it?