Miriam Posner explores the history of supply chain management – and why companies know surprisingly little about where their products come from
While researching her new book, Miriam Posner discovered that corporations know surprisingly little about where components for their own products come from.
Sean Brenner | October 12, 2026
A few years ago, Miriam Posner had an idea for a new assignment for the UCLA class she was teaching on digital labor. She would ask students to trace the supply chain of an electronic device of their choosing — that is, to document the origins of each of the device’s components and to determine how those components eventually came together to form the final product.
In her new book, “Seeing Like a Supply Chain,” to be published Oct. 20 by Yale University Press, Posner writes that she soon abandoned the idea: “Thankfully, I had the sense to attempt the assignment myself before I asked my students to take it on, because I quickly discovered that the task was close to impossible.”
That observation led Posner, a professor of digital humanities and of information studies, to dive into the unimaginably massive global impact of a field called supply chain management, which she describes as the invisible code running the global economy.
In an interview on the eve of the book’s publication, Posner spoke about the interesting connection between supply chain management and modern computing and her realization that corporations themselves know surprisingly little about where components for their products come from — a fact they can use to their advantage when labor or environmental issues arise.