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

Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes in the UK—at Heathrow Airport and Lindsey Oil Refinery—we explore the potential for workers to intervene in such globalizing processes. We highlight both the ability of grassroots workers to mobilize their own spatial networks but also their limitations in an increasingly hostile neoliberal landscape.

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Intervening in globalization: the spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour’s collective agency

Accumulation and Dispossession: Lifting the Veil on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Trafficking, forced labour and related phenomena have been documented time and again in recent years by advocacy groups, the media and government agencies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 20.9 million people in some form of forced labour worldwide. The estimate is broken down regionally and sectorally: 11.7 million of these are thought to be in the Asia and Pacific region; and 18.7 million are believed to be in the private economy, among whom 14.2 million are involved in economic activities not related to sexual exploitation. Debt bondage appears to be the most common mechanism of forced labour (cf. ILO 2005; 2012; Andrees and Belser 2009). The prevalence of labour relations characterized by various forms of unfreedom raises critical questions about how the phenomenon fits into the contemporary economy, and therefore about how to address the issue(s) in ways that advance the interests of all exploited workers.

Unfreedom and workers’ power: ever-present possibilities

Demographic aging can alter physical and social infrastructures in cities, and reshape the broader dynamic processes that theories of urbanization seek to describe and analyze. We argue that both u...

At the Intersection of Urban and Care Policy: The Invisibility of Eldercare Workers in the Global City:

This special section of Environment and Planning A is the outcome of a panel we organized at the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) held in Oxford, UK in August 2015. The panel was intended to reflect on the role and influence of feminist work in economic geography; a sub-discipline distinguished by its heterogeneous theoretical and methodological approaches. In particular, it sought to encourage reflection on the extent to which economic geography as a sub-discipline has responded to feminist interventions that have drawn attention to the cultural construction of difference in ways that pose a challenge to its more generalized categories and frameworks of analysis (for example, regional development, labour, the firm, the state). Taking as our starting point, Linda McDowell’s (1991) article ‘Life without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism’, which was published a quarter of a century ago (and revisited 10 years later, see McDowell, 2001), we asked to what extent and in what ways feminism (here referred to in the singular, but clearly ‘feminisms’ in practice) has changed the way economic geography is done? To what degree has the sub-discipline benefitted from the attention paid over the past 25 years to reproductive and domestic labour, the gender order and the interactions of categories of difference such as gender, class and race in our research enquiries? In presenting a case for the importance of gender in understanding an emerging postFordist economy, McDowell’s (1991) article was tremendously significant in pushing scholars of economic geography to examine the interconnections between the sphere of production and the sphere of social reproduction (a category of analysis which includes the family, the community and the welfare state). It highlighted the gendering of skills

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Kendra Strauss

Papers

Intervening in globalization: the spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour’s collective agency

Accumulation and Dispossession: Lifting the Veil on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Unfreedom and workers’ power: ever-present possibilities

At the Intersection of Urban and Care Policy: The Invisibility of Eldercare Workers in the Global City:

Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?: