Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to ‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks – such as the global commodity chain approach – has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between ‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the ‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development.

Globalizing regional development: aglobal production networks perspective

Thirty-three brothels in rural and small-town Nevada, which contain between 225 and 250 prostitutes, are legal or openly tolerated and strictly controlled by state statute, city and county ordinances, and local rules. Twenty-two of the brothels are in places with populations between 500 and 8,000, and the remaining eleven are in rural areas. The legal and quasi-legal restrictions placed on prostitutes severely limit their activities outside brothels. These restrictions in conjunction with historical inertia, perceived benefits of crime and venereal disease control, and the good image of madams contribute to widespread positive local attitudes toward brothel prostitution. Interactions between clients and prostitutes in brothel parlors are also restricted and limited to a few basic types which are largely determined by entrepreneurial philosophy. KEY WORDS : Nevada, Political geography, Prostitution, Restricted activity spaces.

ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy

Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives

Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Behavioural approaches have become mainstream in economics, supported by the research of cognitive scientists and psychologists, yet their findings have attracted little attention from geographers. This article argues for a renewed behavioural economic geography that builds on research in behavioural economics but also addresses one of its main shortcomings: a lack of engagement with the social context of decision-making. I outline a research agenda that bridges the gap between the disciplines in the area of pension decision-making, using the example of choice in UK occupational plans to argue for a mixed methodological approach to meet the challenge of taking context seriously.

Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making

This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly domi...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0309132517717786

Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity?

In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for ur...

Kendra Strauss

Papers

Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives

Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making

Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity?

With, against and beyond Lefebvre: : Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality