Showing papers in "Progress in Human Geography in 2004"
TL;DR: In this paper, a distinction is made between the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there dubbed buzz and the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication called pipelines to selected providers located outside the local milieu.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in interactive learning processes. It questions the view that tacit knowledge transfer is confined to local milieus whereas codified knowledge may roam the globe almost frictionlessly. The paper highlights the conditions under which both tacit and codified knowledge can be exchanged locally and globally. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there dubbed buzz and, on the other, the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication called pipelines to selected providers located outside the local milieu. It is argued that the co-existence of high levels of buzz and many pipelines may provide firms located in outward-looking and lively clusters with a string of particular advantages not available to outsiders. Finally, some policy implications, stemming from this argumen...
3,942 citations
Journal Article•
1,105 citations
TL;DR: The concept of embeddedness has gained much prominence in economic geography over the last decade, as much work has been done on the social and organizational foundations of economic activities and regional development.
Abstract: The concept of embeddedness has gained much prominence in economic geography over the last decade, as much work has been done on the social and organizational foundations of economic activities and regional development. Unlike the original conceptualizations, however, embeddedness is mostly conceived of as a ‘spatial’ concept related to the local and regional levels of analysis. By revisiting the early literature on embeddedness in particular the seminal work of Karl Polanyi and Mark Granovetter and critically engaging with what I will call an ‘overterritorialized’ concept, a different view on the fundamental categories of embeddedness is proposed. This reconceptualization then is illustrated using the poststructuralist metaphor of a rhizome to interpret the notion of embeddedness and its applicability to different geographical scales.
815 citations
TL;DR: In 2003, the US-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, announced that the new tax regime would be 'admirably straightforward'; it would be based on a 15% maximum rate for both corporate and individual taxation as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Iraq now has a new tax code. The US-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, announced in October 2003 that the new tax regime would be 'admirably straightforward'; it would be based on a 15% maximum rate for both corporate and individual taxation. This imposition was greeted as 'extremely good news' by flat-tax advocates like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who opined that this 'might be a hint to the rest of us . . . Somehow, it's easier when you start from scratch' (quoted in Washington Post, 2 November 2003: Al). Starting from scratch is rarely an option, of course, for most neoliberal tax reformers, who can only gaze in envy at what has been achieved in flat-tax states like Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Hong Kong and now Iraq. But, of course, the process of reform was helped along by systemic ruptures in the domestic political economies of this curious collection of vanguard states. Even in the neoliberal heartlands, like the United States, progress towards such totemic domestic policy objectives can be slow. For all the concerted efforts of the Republican right, libertarian groups and corporate-funded think tanks, the project of dismantling the progressive tax code, and the 'social state' within which it is typically coupled, has been a couple of decades or more in the making, and it is far from complete (see Hall et al., 1996; Greider, 2003). It is, nevertheless, a project with a clearly articulated ultimate objective, even if its endpoint remains a distant goal. For neoliberal reformers, the discursive construction of such starkly utopian destinations the market society and all that it implies plays an important role in rallying the troops, bolstering convictions and aligning short-term tactics with long-term goals. As Norquist has elsewhere explained, 'I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub' (quoted on National Public Radio, 25 May 2001).
560 citations
TL;DR: The second of three reviews of action-oriented research in social geography focuses on one area of this work which is thriving as discussed by the authors, and it has particular attractions for social geographers, who are beginning to contribute to wider debates and critiques around its philosophies, theories and practices.
Abstract: This second of three reviews of action-orientated research in social geography focuses on one area of this work which is thriving. Moving, like many good ideas, from the field conventionally viewed as ‘development’ to wider application, participatory research (PR) has seen rapid expansion in recent years (see Breitbart, 2003; Kesby et al., 2004; Pratt, 2000). It has particular attractions for social geographers, who are beginning to contribute to wider debates and critiques around its philosophies, theories and practices. They face, too, all of the problems involved in getting academic geography ‘onto the streets’ (Fuller and Kitchin, 2004).
462 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a discussion of the "materiality" of the urban environment is presented, and two pathways along which the materialities of the city might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the'material' and 'non-material' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities.
Abstract: In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban.
358 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the broader geographies of NGO intervention in international development, and focus on case-study-based research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Abstract: Much research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in international development has been case-study-based, with questions about the broader geographies of NGO intervention rarely asked....
322 citations
TL;DR: The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies as discussed by the authors, specifically, feminists have foregrounded the importance of women in migration literature.
Abstract: The feminist migration literature in geography has contributed to bringing several critical social theoretical themes to the forefront of migration studies. Specifically, feminists have foregrounde...
321 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness.
Abstract: This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order to expose and undercut this reinscription of otherness, research on East-Central Europe should engage with postcolonial theory in a more direct and sustained fashion.
316 citations
313 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show how the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labour market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics.
Abstract: In this paper, I build on Paul Cloke's (2002) provocative argument about the necessity of developing an ethical stance in human geography. I do this, however, through an assessment of the implications of a number of changes - in the nature of the labour market in Great Britain, in the assumptions that lie behind welfare provision under New Labour and in the position of women and men in Britain - rather than through an emphasis on the Christian values that infused Cloke's argument. I show how the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labour market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics. If an ethic of care is to be (re)instituted, it will demand wide-reaching changes in the ways in which organizations and institutions operate at a range of spatial scales as well as new sets of responsibilities towards co-workers, members of households and the wider public. I conclude by considering some of the implications of such an ethic for everyday practices within the academy.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider recent pleas for a 'geography of gentrification' and argue that they have been very urban in focus and often enact what, following Soja (1996), might be described as 'firstspace' or 'first-space'.
Abstract: This paper considers recent pleas for a ‘geography of gentrification’, arguing that they have been very urban in focus and often enact what, following Soja (1996), might be described as ‘firstspace...
TL;DR: Hart et al. as discussed by the authors explored the Faustian bargain entered into by oil companies in the Middle East, backed up by the US military, and pointed out the dangers of the impact model.
Abstract: The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq conjure up eerily familiar specters – the continuities and specificities of contemporary imperialism in relation to its late nineteenthcentury forebear, both framed in terms of liberal civilizing missions (cf. Smith, 2003); discourses of regime change and nation-building; and projects of reconstruction and ‘development’ spearheaded by the Bechtel Corporation. We live in a time not of ‘Jihad vs. McWorld ‘as Barber (1995) would have it, Timothy Mitchell (2002a) argues, but a complex interplay of forces he terms McJihad. His forensic delving into the Faustian bargains entered into by oil companies in the Middle East, backed up by the US military, not only sheds new light on the present conjuncture (see also Watts, 2003). It also serves as an antidote to the jockstrap-snapping excesses of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000), the absurdities of which have been rendered painfully clear by events in the years since its publication. Niall Ferguson’s (2002) appropriation of Empire in his Kiplingesque appeal to North Americans to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ underscores the stakes in contemporary discourses of imperialism. A key challenge confronting critical studies of d/Development (in the sense laid out in my first essay; Hart, 2001) entails coming to grips with persistently diverse but increasingly interconnected trajectories of sociospatial change in different parts of the world. Profound dangers attach to what I have called the ‘impact model’ through which inexorable forces of global capitalism bear down, albeit unevenly, on passive ‘locals’. Yet a rejection of both economism and the tyrannies of science can lead very easily to a dangerous retreat from questions of capitalism, if not to premature celebrations of ‘cultural globalization’ and ‘Empire’. In this third essay, I build on the previous two (Hart, 2001; 2002a) to explore how critical ethnographies can be made to address these challenges in politically enabling ways. Together these essays comprise brief selective cuts into debates rather than a comprehensive review, and are shaped in part by my efforts to grapple with the Progress in Human Geography 28,1 (2004) pp. 91–100
TL;DR: The rise of world music exemplifies the multiple ways in which places are constructed, commodified and contested as mentioned in this paper, and music from distant and "exotic" places has been neglected in geography.
Abstract: Music has been neglected in geography, yet the rise of ‘world music’ exemplifies the multiple ways in which places are constructed, commodified and contested. Music from distant and ‘exotic’ places...
TL;DR: The authors identify six axioms that are central to conceptualizing economic geographies and explore the links between political-economic and cultural-economic approaches, suggesting that they are most productively seen as complementary both/and approaches rather than as competitive either/or ones.
Abstract: The last decade or so has been one of ongoing, at times heated, debate in economic geography as to how best to conceptualize and theorize economies and their geographies. Reflecting on these debates, I identify six axioms that are central to conceptualizing economic geographies. I then go on to consider issues of culture and the economy and the relationships between them. The paper explores the links between political-economic and cultural-economic approaches, suggesting that they are most productively seen as complementary both/and approaches rather than as competitive either/or ones.
TL;DR: The geography of intellectual creativity and change using as a case study the quantitative revolution in geography is discussed in this paper, where the authors highlight the nature and persistence of intellectual breaks and ruptures; the embodiedness and material embeddedness of the intellectual process; and the centrality of networks and alliances.
Abstract: The paper is concerned with understanding the geography of intellectual creativity and change using as a case study the quantitative revolution in geography. First, I review briefly the sea change occurring over the last 40 years in understanding intellectual production, and made most forcefully in the literature in the sociology of scientific knowledge. I highlight three elements: the nature and persistence of intellectual breaks and ruptures; the embodiedness and material embeddedness of the intellectual process; and the centrality of networks and alliances. Secondly, I take each of these three components of intellectual production, and work them through different theories of place to illuminate the role of the geographical within each. In particular, I argue that the geography of intellectual rupture is clarified by using Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, that the place of intellectual embodiment and embeddedness is elucidated by Kevin Hetherington and John Law's work on materiality, and that sp...
TL;DR: The most progressive are becoming more political: more politically critical and engaged, more concerned with the vast diversity of contemporary power relations, and thus more attuned to the politically significant economic, social and cultural processes that at once exceed and enframe the increasingly instrumentalized and banalized space of state politics.
Abstract: We live in urgent times in spaces defined by exploitation, brutality, anxiety, desperation, and too often too limited efforts at resistance. How are political geographers responding? The most progressive are becoming more political: more politically critical and engaged, more concerned with the vast diversity of contemporary power relations, and thus more attuned to the politically significant economic, social and cultural processes that at once exceed and enframe the increasingly instrumentalized and banalized space of state politics. As recent collective deliberations on the limits of the subdiscipline have shown, the resulting remappings of the 'political' in political geography have been remarkable (Cox and Low, 2003; Desbiens et al., 2004). However, as Eleonore Kofman (2003) argues, they have brought with them the danger of emptying the political of meaning, of finding it everywhere and thus ultimately nowhere. Following Ruth Fincher (2004) and Lynn Staeheli (1996), she suggests that one ethnographically engaged approach to this problem is to investigate the discontinuities between that which is socially debated as 'political' and the geographical contexts in which it can be said to take place (see also the parallel discussion of P/politics in Philo and Smith, 2003). Another more disciplinary but complementary tactic, following John Agnew (2003a), is to return to such core geographical themes as territoriality, scale, region, space and place, connecting them to some of the main questions about politics including questions of distribution, antagonism and political constitution (Brown and Staeheli, 2003) that continue to animate political theory (for an impressive example of the complementarity of this approach when combined with engaged feminist ethnography, see Silvey, 2003). Both these responses make a great deal of sense, particularly as correctives to the unfortunate recent trend towards the double dissolution of politics and geography in
TL;DR: Opposition to the relativistic, indeed ultimately solipsistic implications of epistemological insiderism, concern over the fragmenting, in certain respects disabling consequences of identity politics, resurgent interest in forms of civic commonality, rethinking of the modalities of and rationale for affirmative action, not only on the part of its longstanding critics on the right, but on its longstanding defenders on the left suggest that, in some respects at least, the maximally differentialist moment may have passed as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Opposition to the relativistic, indeed ultimately solipsistic implications of epistemological insiderism; concern over the fragmenting, in certain respects disabling consequences of identity politics; resurgent interest in forms of civic commonality; rethinking of the modalities of and rationale for affirmative action, not only on the part of its longstanding critics on the right, but on the part of its longstanding defenders on the left – these and other developments suggest that, in some respects at least, the maximally differentialist moment may have passed. Brubaker (2003, 40–41)
TL;DR: The authors critically evaluates the debate in human geography and cognate fields about economy-culture relationships and takes issue with the terms of the debate, wherein different authors have expressed different opinions about different authors' positions.
Abstract: This essay critically evaluates the debate in human geography and cognate fields about economy-culture relationships. It takes issue with the terms of the debate, wherein different authors have sou...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on changing approaches to map use and mapping practices, which are increasingly informed by a nonrepresentational theory that is at once critical but also concerned with culture and politics, while reflecting a continuing public interest in the iconic role of maps in geography.
Abstract: For my last progress report, I have chosen to focus upon changing approaches to map use and mapping practices. I am prompted by the appearance of several theme issues of journals and a number of important books to focus in greater detail on recent research linking culture to the mapping process and in particular to some of the changing ways in which the power of mapping is practised, contested and subverted, but also by a recent resurgence of public interest in the history of mapping, shown by the publication of mass-market 'mapping tales' relating biography to histories of cartography. The former are increasingly informed by a nonrepresentational theory that is at once critical but also concerned with culture and politics, while the latter reflect a continuing public interest in the iconic role of maps in geography, seemingly at variance to geographers' contemporary obsession with writing and theory. This variance forms the second theme in this article. Theoreticians of the new critical cartography usually employ words to extol the virtues of socially informed critiques of mappings, leaving to other people the messy and contingent process of creating mapping as visualizations. The discursive power of the word seems increasingly hegemonic in geographic literature, despite geographical interest in the visual and occasional clarion calls to the contrary (e.g., Lilley, 2000). Analysis and deconstruction predominates over creation. The central argument of this piece and the justification for printing an extravagant, contested and complex mapped image in this review straddles these two themes. How have geographers' cartographic anxieties related to other envisionings, and to the increasingly confident literature emerging around enacted performative mappings and practices? How might everyday context, culture and practice relate to the
TL;DR: In a recent review of the literature on mortality in population geography, the authors found only seven articles which focus explicitly on mortality over the last nine years (Garrett and Reid, 1995, Root, 1999, Gupta and Baghel, 2000, Ramiro-Farifias and Sanz-Gimeno, 2000; Congdon et al., 2001; Reher, 2001; Mooney, 2002).
Abstract: This is my third, and final, Progress in Human Geography review paper for population geography where I turn to mortality the third of the core areas of the subdiscipline. There has, it seems to me, been a gradual decline in interest among population geographers in the geography of mortality. This is not to ignore some important and interesting mortality research conducted by population geographers but it is evident that, compared to migration research, interest in mortality has diminished. Thus, in perusing the back issues of the International Journal of Population Geography (now Population, Space and Place), I find only seven articles which focus explicitly on mortality in the last nine years (Garrett and Reid, 1995; Root, 1999; Gupta and Baghel, 2000; Ramiro-Farifias and Sanz-Gimeno, 2000; Congdon et al., 2001; Reher, 2001; Mooney, 2002) and most of these are historical or based in the developing world. This is despite the fact that there is a number of contemporary mortality-based research questions that should fall much more squarely within the interests of population geographers. One outcome of this declining interest is that many of the contemporary geographical studies of mortality are being conducted by health geographers (or epidemiologists or medical sociologists) rather than population geographers. This seems appropriate, given the strong relationship between health and mortality, but it is relevant to note that population geographers continue to focus on mortality as an 'event', which may be counted in a life table, or contribute to a demographic forecast or estimate, and seem to have been less interested in considering mortality in the context of morbidity or illness. For example, population geographers have been less concerned with the apparently widening gap between better-off and worse-off areas (and people) that has become a major focus in health geography. I would suggest that this is an area of research which should equally be at the heart of population geography for a number of reasons and, in this review, I aim
TL;DR: Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields as discussed by the authors, such as anthropology, sociology and environmental studies.
Abstract: Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields. Productive interconnections are evidenced, for example, in the extensive debate and discussion within geography that surround the varied relations (e.g., theory, methods, roles of science and representation, scale and subject matter) of cultural ecology to political ecology, since the latter is regarded as a chief cognate approach. Sufficient similarities evident in that dialogue led to the renaming of the specialty group within the Association of American Geographers as Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE). This broadly based cultural ecology is currently counted as one of the most active and popular of the specialty groups within the organization, and it is the largest of the groups that are focused on human-environment interaction. Reaching this position has occurred though a process of incremental growth over the course of the period since 1960 in a range of distinct subfields, such as cultural-historical ecology, human ecology, systems ecology and adaptive-dynamics ecology. Cultural ecology thus conveys the sense of an umbrella approach, which continues to serve as the integrator for a considerable variety of subfields. While broad in scope, the approach of cultural ecology is also sharing new interconnections with the expanding suite of other human-environment approaches. For example, the ‘human dimensions of global change’ appears to share a defining emphasis on the interaction of global environmental processes with local actors and institutions that is common to much of cultural ecology. The interconnections of cultural ecology with political ecology and with ‘human dimensions’ is typically dialogic, often to a high degree, in that most studies associated with one field are actively informed by and engaged with the others. This dialogic tendency in cultural ecology is found also in relation to various other distinctly framed approaches toward human-environment interaction (in geography as well as anthropology, sociology and environmental studies). Several intersecting points
TL;DR: The authors examines the material and imaginative geographies of colonial philanthropy in parts of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century, and advocates a more nuanced conception of the heterogeneity of colonial discourse.
Abstract: Through an examination of the material and imaginative geographies of colonial philanthropy in parts of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century, this paper advocates a more nuanced conception of the heterogeneity of colonial discourse. At the same time, it elaborates a networked conceptualization of empire. Particular attention is paid to the moralities of closeness, distance and connection, the spatial politics of knowledge, and the spatial and temporal translation of the trope of ‘slavery’ within philanthropic discourse. The paper raises colonial philanthropy as an object of inquiry that has relevance for contemporary globalized humanitarianism as well as for cross-cultural tension within former imperial sites.
TL;DR: Leong et al. as mentioned in this paper argue that shopping is the medium by which the market has solidified its grip on our spaces, buildings, cities, activities, and lives, and that it is the material outcome of the degree to which market economy has shaped our surroundings, and ultimately ourselves.
Abstract: Not only is shopping melting into everything, but everything is melting into shopping. Through successive waves of expansion – each more extensive and pervasive than the previous – shopping has methodically encroached on a widening spectrum of territories so that it is now, arguably, the defining activity of public life . . . . Shopping is the medium by which the market has solidified its grip on our spaces, buildings, cities, activities, and lives. It is the material outcome of the degree to which the market economy has shaped our surroundings, and ultimately ourselves. (Leong, 2001: 129)
TL;DR: The authors review recent developments in choice modelling that offer promise for studying spatial choices, focusing on the ability of general choice models to account for a richer pattern of spatial substitution than afforded by early choice models.
Abstract: This paper is designed to review recent developments in choice modelling that offer promise for studying spatial choices. In particular, we focus on the ability of general choice models to account for a richer pattern of spatial substitution than afforded by early choice models. We argue that the generality offered by these choice models is sufficient to rethink the current view that spatial choice is a distinct field of inquiry. Our conclusion is that, while space complicates choice models, contemporary aspatial choice models are general enough to accommodate these complexities.