Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital structures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequently relegate labor to the status of “variable capital.” Both approaches present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how workers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that workers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is made; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call “labor's spatial fix” and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spatial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as geographical agents into understandings of the production of space under capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create “labor's spatial fix” are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor Geography) and so to write less capital-oriented economic geographies.

From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and theGeography of Capitalism

A vibrant debate has raged in geography and other social sciences over the past several years, concerning the nature and extent of changes to contemporary capitalism that might be identified as more flexible. This paper critically surveys the recent work on this theme, identifying areas of consensus, continuing disagreement, and important but still neglected questions. Some consensus appears to have emerged over the types of new practices that firms are pursuing in their production systems, about the nature of contemporary competition, and about the continuing importance of politics and social relations in production. Disagreement remains evident on empirical questions concerning the pervasiveness and significance of flexible practices, on the characteristics of a 'true' industrial district, and on the role and importance of large versus small firms. Theoretical debates continue over how to interpret local cases of success or failure, as well as the motive forces underlying contemporary economic change. As for neglected issues, there is a pressing need for more systematic and comparative analysis cutting across a wider range of local experiences. There is also a need to redress the relative lack of attention directed toward declining regions, service industries, and gender relations in the economy. Nor have the continuing importance of nation-states, nor the geographical determinants of forces of production, yet received their due. The paper concludes by highlighting new dilemmas facing geographers as the theory of flexible industrialization is translated increasingly into practice.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/622879.pdf

Flexibility Revisited: Districts, Nation-States, and the Forces of Production

Valuable resources often exist at distant points from a firm's current locations, with the result that strategic decisions such as growth have a spatial dimension in which firms seek information and choose between geographically distributed alternatives. Studies show that geographic proximity facilitates the flow of resources, but there is limited understanding of factors that exacerbate or ease the impact of geographic distance when firms seek new resources. This paper argues that the difficulty of search increases with distance, particularly when search involves greater information processing, but that firms can partially overcome the constraints of distance with direct, contextual, and vicarious learning. We study 2,070 domestic acquisition announcements by U.S. chemical manufacturers founded after 1979. The results demonstrate the persistent effect of spatial geography on organizational search processes.

The Persistent Effect of Geographic Distance in Acquisition Target Selection

Labour has for a long time been an important concept in economic geography, but more often as a cost that influences investment decisions than as a social force in its own right. Recently, however, some geographers have begun putting the politics of labour at the forefront of the analysis. Labour geography can be understood as a discernible strand of research which, throughout the last decade or so, has begun to emerge from a wider Anglo-American Marxist-inspired geography tradition. In this article, I will critically review this emerging literature, which represents a fresh approach to the recent changes in the world of work and to the close relationships between workers, firms, the state and the wider community. Particularly interesting – from a geographical point of view – are the strategies of organised labour in creating new scales of organising, and in rethinking old ones.

Places of Work, Scales of Organising: A Review of Labour Geography

The extensive restructuring of industrialized economies continues to challenge workers and their unions in the 1990s. Labor unions are trying to remain viable institutions in the face of globalization of economic production, deindustrialization, and technological change. These processes have increasingly challenged workers in traditionally highly unionized sectors of the economy such as manufacturing and resource extraction industries. At the same time, unions have failed to organize large numbers of workers, often young and female, in geographically fragmented workplaces in expanding sectors of the economy such as consumer services and subcontracted goods production. There has been a call for new “spatialized strategies” allowing unions to access these new sectors and spaces and to produce scales of organization compatible with post-industrial capital. One strategy being adopted by the labor movement is coalition building with non-labor community interest groups with common goals in order to shape geographies of production. The experience of two Canadian unions with “community unionism” is discussed as an example of a spatialized strategy still in early development.

Community Unionism in Canada and Labor's (Re)Organization of Space

This paper examines spatial search behavior related to intra-urban migration. Its approach is to draw upon related studies to derive expectations with regard to search patterns, and to test these through empirical analysis. This involves identifying and measuring distance, directional, and sectoral spatial biases, for which an algorithm is presented that employs a map transformation and standard ellipse analysis.

Search Behavior in an Intra-Urban Migration Context: A Spatial Perspective:

In 1985, after being represented by the United Automobile Workers union (UAW) for almost half a century, Canadian autoworkers split from the International Union to form their own independent union, the CAW. To date, most interpretations have attributed the split to political, cultural, and ideological differences between the US and Canadian sections of the union. Through an analysis of restructuring and collective bargaining in the North American automobile industry, it is argued in this paper that the split in the UAW was rooted in the tensions that arose over the different, and increasingly incompatible, bargaining agendas and strategies adopted by the Canadian and US sections of the union during the 1980s. The analysis shows that these differences in strategy resulted primarily from the geographically uneven effects of the significant restructuring which was taking place in the North American automobile industry during this period.

The Break-up of an International Labour Union: Uneven Development in the North American Auto Industry and the Schism in the UAW

The continental integration of the US and Canadian automobile industries quickly followed the negotiation of a sectorial managed trade agreement—the Auto Pact—in 1965. Thus the recent Canada—US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) will likely have less short-term impact on restructuring in the auto industry than it will in most other industries. The paper begins with an analysis of the significant restructuring that occurred within the North American auto industry during the 1980s in response to the globalization of production and dramatic changes in competitive conditions. The future prospects of the industry as it enters the 1990s are examined with regard to three issues: the likely impact of the implementation of the automotive-industry provisions of the FTA; the consolidation of the significant auto-manufacturing presence in North America established by Japanese automakers during the 1980s; and the fact that, with or without the negotiation of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it appears likely tha...

J Holmes

Papers

Search Behavior in an Intra-Urban Migration Context: A Spatial Perspective:

The Break-up of an International Labour Union: Uneven Development in the North American Auto Industry and the Schism in the UAW

The Continental Integration of the North American Automobile Industry: From the Auto Pact to the FTA and beyond: