Industrial and geographical mobility of workers during industry decline: The Swedish and German shipbuilding industries 1970–2000

This article follows the industry employment histories of all individuals who at some point have been affiliated with the declining German or the dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industry during 1970–2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding, investigating the extent to which they were employed at all, tended to move to related sectors within or outside the region, and whether such moves were beneficial for the individuals. Combining insights from labour geography and redundancy studies with evolutionary economic geography, we find remarkably similar results for the West German and Swedish cases. Our findings indicate a notable impact of the regional industry structure on the labour market outcomes for workers leaving shipbuilding. This suggests that more attention should be devoted to the specific structures of the absorptive capacity of regional labour markets. The findings are discussed within the context of a mature industry.     

The spatial patterns of mass strikes: A labour geography approach

Labour geography aims to explore aspects of workers’ agency that have not yet been at the centre of research, this includes: the links between working-class politics and local communities, the interdependence of global economic networks and working-class activities, and the spatial dimension of workers’ organisations. Although these aspects are relevant for the dynamics of mass strikes, an analysis of mass strikes has been largely absent from debates in labour geography. Rosa Luxemburg’s seminal analysis of strikes in Russia demonstrated the rapid spatial expansion of these movements without any central organisation. Similar phenomena have occurred in recent mass strikes in the emerging economies. This text shows how mass strikes in Brazil, India and South Africa can be investigated through a labour geography lens and calls for a renewed debate on how a ‘strike wave’ is defined or understood.     

Labouring geography: Negotiating scales, strategies and future directions

In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward.     

Place of life stories in labour geography: Why does it matter?

Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.     

Illuminating the practice of Knowledge Exchange as a ‘pathway to impact’ within an Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange’ project

This article is concerned with the practice of Knowledge Exchange (KE) within the creative economy. Drawing on material collected as part of an ethnographic study of a small creative business support agency – Cultural Enterprise Office – based in Glasgow, Scotland, the article argues for a nuanced consideration of the complexities of doing KE in the creative economy. The study in question was titled ‘Supporting Creative Business’ and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange programme. This article describes the practice of KE, and the role that it might play as a ‘pathway to impact’. I explore the often-mundane activities that constitute KE ‘on the ground’, and argue for further attention to be paid to what I call ‘informal KE’. This article contributes directly to ongoing debates in geography about the effect that the impact agenda is having on academic practice. More specifically, the article examines the role of academics vis-à-vis consultants and other knowledge producers within the creative economy.     

Political geography in the time of cyberspaces: New agendas?

This review paper aims to offer a contribution to debates over theory and subject for political geography. Following a brief review of histories of political geography, the main (though not exclusive) focus is on the way that political geography may confront ‘globalization’ and the multiplicity of flows that constitute ‘cyberspaces’. Notwithstanding the consequences of the resulting transformations, the paper argues that a number of traditional subjects of political geography should remain central to the field. In particular, it is argued that a degree of state-centric focus continues to be a valuable critical project. However, such a focus needs to be supplemented by a stress on the dialectical relationships between the state, territory, culture and economy. The approach taken to this in World Systems-Theory is critiqued and some alternatives are explored. In these explorations the paper also argues for an increased engagement and cross-fertilization between political, economic, social and cultural geographies, and with critical work in political science and international relations.     

Trade unions, coalitions and communities: Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the international stakeholder campaign against Rio Tinto

There is a growing geographical literature on the significance of organised labour. A key theoretical and political question concerns the extent and nature of the engagement between trade unions and other groups in the broader community. The paper seeks to contribute to this debate by focusing specifically on the ways in which trade unions engage collaboratively with such interest groups over international corporate campaign issues. It draws upon a case study of the encounter between Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and Rio Tinto, one of the largest privately owned mining companies in the world. This was conducted through a loose alliance co-ordinated by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM). The campaign included the use of stakeholder reports aimed at influencing corporate shareholders. The main issues concerned the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental consequences of mining operations, and human rights in the workplace. The attempt to change these aspects of corporate culture led to union-inspired resolutions at the firm’s May 2000 Annual General Meeting, the first attempt to challenge a company through international union-led action in this manner. Although defeated, the resolutions were backed by a significant minority of leading institutional shareholders. The paper interprets this campaign in terms of broader debates over the spatiality of organised labour and the role of trade unions, at a time when increased significance has been attached to alternative political movements. It seeks to theorise the specific implications of internationally-grounded interest-based campaigns and take into account the ways in which these are both constrained by, and draw strength from, their constitution at this spatial scale.     

Paradoxes of modernity: imperial Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821

This paper examines the spatial dynamics of urbanism in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century. Conventional narratives of modernisation fail to capture the complexities of this moment, between 1808 and 1821, when the city replaced Lisbon as the capital of the Portuguese empire. The position of colony and metropolis were inverted, Portuguese absolutism was bolstered by British liberalism, and a market-economy arose alongside the expansion of slavery. As the newly-created imperial capital, Rio felt the effects of these various transformations: the physical boundaries of the city rapidly expanded, its economy diversified and the cultural life of the city was re-shaped. Our aim in this paper is to understand this particular moment of urban transformation as a product of the intersection of global networks of trade, slavery and industrial capitalism. Rather than depicting the historical geography of the city as a passive space for European conquest and expansion, we consider the extent to which its urban dynamics were shaped by a distinct local geography of globalisation. In particular, we examine the interrelated spatialities that are part and parcel of the modernising process.     

Regulatory migration regimes and the production of space: The case of Nepalese workers in South Korea

This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised regulation of low-wage migrant workers. A key tool in this process is the Employment Permit System (EPS), in force since 2004. Under this policy migrant workers are temporary sojourners and effectively socio-politically, culturally and spatially excluded from Korean society. EPS restricts migrants’ freedom to choose or change workplaces, which renders them vulnerable to economic and social precarity. Employers use these restrictions to segregate migrant workers from co-nationals, and low-waged migrant workers often find themselves in exploitative working conditions in isolated places. This paper is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in “Nepal Town” in Seoul and remote Nepalese workers’ accommodation. We examine how such precarious working conditions and isolation impact on workers’ active involvement in the formation and transformation of Nepal Town in Seoul. We examine the ways in which Nepal Town is a site of spatial agency and praxis for Nepalese workers and explore the potentialities of ‘reactive ethnicity’. The empirical insights provided, suggest that the regulatory migration regime for low-wage migrant workers is strongly linked with new formations of material landscapes of connection, mobility, freedom and safe space. Such space production enables migrant workers to perform agency and employ tactics of resistance in order to create spaces of possibility.     

Geography and the pragmatic tradition: The threefold engagement

Geography has had only limited interchange with the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This paper claims that a closer engagement with pragmatism has much to offer to geography, not least in providing an arena within which very different types of geographical inquiry - qualitative and quantitative, human and physical - may find some common ground for useful conversation and debate. However, this will only be fully achieved if geography embarks on a threefold engagement with pragmatism: (1) studies that develop and deploy specific pragmatist ideas and concepts within particular geographical research; (2) studies that attempt to relate geographical research to the wider arena of the pragmatic tradition; (3) historical examination of early links between pragmatism, social science and geography. The history and contemporary revival of pragmatism is described, together with its impacts on social theory and social science. The existing literature on geographical engagement with pragmatism is then examined, and it is argued that there is a much broader relevance within both human and physical geography, not linked to particular styles of research. The question of the history of earlier influences of pragmatism on American geography is then raised, and some linkages charted. The philosopher Hilary Putnam has used the term ‘pragmatist enlightenment’ to describe what he sees as the promise of pragmatism, and the paper concludes by suggesting that this also promises an exciting and fruitful engagement for geography.     

Job-related mobility and plant performance in Sweden

This paper uses a Swedish micro-dataset containing 2,696,909 hires during the period 2002–2006 to assess the impact of job-related mobility on plant-level performance. The analysis classifies new recruits according to their work experience and level of formal qualification, as well as by the region of origin and of destination. New hires are divided into graduates and experienced workers and between high- and low-educated. The results point towards the importance of acknowledging both the experience and the skills of new recruits. The greatest benefits are related to hiring new workers from outside the region where the plant is located. The analysis also stresses the importance of geography, with plants in metropolitan regions gaining the most from labour mobility, while the benefits of mobility for plants in smaller, more peripheral regions are more diverse and dependent on both the type and origin of new workers.     

W(h)ither South African human geography?

South African human geographers have been largely silent in debates about Anglo-American disciplinary hegemony, hierarchies of knowledge, ir/relevance and myriad other debates about the academy and geographical knowledge. This paper offers a critical reflection on current tendencies within South African human geography towards parochialism, empiricism and disconnection from the international academy. Pointing to these developments as being rooted within the local geographical tradition, a call is made for greater critical self-reflection in order to re-engage international debates and advance local transformation. The tendency to bemoan the dominance of Anglo-American journals and academics, as well as contextual systematic constraints, is noted and established scholars gently chastised for failing to move beyond complaints towards measures that offer a way forward in these debates.     

Responsible adults-in-the-making: Intergenerational impact of parental migration on Indonesian young women’s aspirational capacity

In the developing economies in Southeast Asia, labour migration is increasingly seen not simply to generate income to meet short-term livelihood needs but to secure the family’s future, often by investing in children’s education. While much work has been done studying the impact of parents’ remittances on children’s wellbeing including education access, the impact of parental migration on children’s (educational) aspirations has received less attention. Viewing youth as social actors, this paper interrogates how they make meaning of their parents’ migration, and how this consequently influences their decisions to activate, delay or reshape their hopes and plans for their own educational and work trajectories. With the increasing feminisation of labour migration in Southeast Asia where gendered regimes in care and domestic work make it easier for women to work overseas, this paper focuses attention on the aspirations of young women at the cusp of adulthood from a migrant-sending area in rural East Java, Indonesia. These young women’s ‘navigational capacity’ (Appadurai, 2004) is not only shaped by tangible obstacles such as the lack of sufficient resources, but is also more subtly moulded by an emerging discourse of self-responsibilisation in the making of ‘dutiful daughters’. Drawing on conceptualisations of multiple ‘logics of aspiring’ operating within spatial contexts (Zipin et al., 2015), we show how young women unsettle, inflect and challenge the normative linear education-work transitions by expressing their desire to replace their parents in accessing labour migration as a livelihood option, and reflect on the dialectical relationship between agency and aspirations.     

War on Terror,work in progress: security,surveillance and the configuration of the US workfare state

This paper evaluates the impact of recent shifts in the geopolitical outlook of the United States—specifically the ‘Global War on Terror’ and its domestic ramifications—on the prior project of reconfiguring the US state to an after-Fordist ‘workfare’ paradigm. In particular, the paper attempts to situate recent developments in the reconfiguration of the American welfare state within the context of debates over the ‘exceptional’ nature of US politics post-9/11. The extent to which this has had a bearing on work practices, welfare provision and workfarism is investigated, citing examples from the post-9/11 era. On the basis of such examples it has been suggested that the project of reconfiguring the US welfare state and labour relations does overlap and intersect with the emergency practices that the US state has instituted domestically as part of the War on Terror. However, the reconfiguration of the US welfare state towards a neoliberal or workfarist paradigm is, we argue, largely part of the ‘normal’ (as opposed to exceptional) fabric of US politics. The project of reconfiguring the US welfare state is ongoing and largely autonomous (although not entirely removed) from the use of exceptional practices in relation to the US security state. Investigation of this relationship, we assert, provides a potentially fruitful ‘new direction’ for both critical geopolitics and political economic geography, and grounds for interaction between the two.     

Geography's role in general education in the United States

In the United States, geography is taught most frequently in the junior secondary schools, is somewhat more limited as a regular course in the senior secondary schools, and is a prominent discipline within many college and university programs of instruction. At the secondary school level, geography is usually integrated within the broader based social studies, while at the college and university level it has an important function both within general education as well as specialized training. At the pre-collegiate and collegiate levels geography has developed quite independently at times, and at other times there has been a close relationship that has benefitted both levels of education. At the end of the 1980s decade, considerable cooperation was underway in the United States between teachers of secondary school and tertiary level geography in order to upgrade and enhance the discipline. In the first part of this paper, a general history of geography within American education is presented. The second part of the paper discusses geography's role within general education at the secondary and tertiary levels, including the academic backgrounds for teachers. The way in which geographic education in the United States provides students with the opportunity to study holistic relationships between people and the environment and its importance to informed citizenship are discussed in the final section of the paper.     

From ‘criminals of the earth’ to ‘stewards of the environment’: The social and environmental justice of Fair Trade gold

The recent emergence of the Fairtrade certification of gold in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa promises a radical new direction for the environmental governance of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). In doing so, it aims to tackle the longstanding environment and development challenges of the sector which mainstream policy has failed to alleviate. The move towards more responsible ASM practices is premised on the strategic deployment of a Fair Trade discourse that argues for its operators to be recognized not as criminals, but as valued and formalized parts of their broader economies. It is argued in this paper that this development intervention should be read within a social and environmental justice framework, one which directly answers the call from political geography for ‘compelling accounts’ of positive representations of the sector.Through a discourse analysis of 10 years of media reports, interviews and recorded life histories of key ASM and Fair Trade stakeholders in Tanzania, it shows how three strands of justice (conceptualized in terms of fairer distribution, procedure and recognition) are articulated by the Fair Trade gold movement and critically assesses the politics behind such a deliberate strategy. In particular, it argues that recognition is a key part of justice that has been underplayed by erstwhile analyses of Fair Trade. Through a case study of Tanzania, it is concluded that although significant progress has been made in terms of arguing for greater recognition for ASM operators, there remains a need to better link discourse with practice in establishing greater distributional justice.     

Epistemology and conceptions of people and nature in geography

The paper attempts to integrate two major issues of debate in geography which are conventionally discussed separately: epistemology and conceptions of the relationship between people and Nature. Whichever issue we start with, two concepts are essential: intersubjectivity and labour. Knowledge of natural objects is tied to labour, which both subjects ideas to a kind of test and changes our position within Nature. All knowledge depends upon intersubjective understanding between people, but this implies that in social science, and hence in human geography, the traditional subject-object relationship should be recast as a form of communication between ‘knowing-subjects’. These relationships are not limited to some separate sphere of epistemology but are constitutive of society in Nature itself. Labour, though traditionally overlooked in geography, is the most active and transformative process in changing Nature and society, and intersubjectivity is an essential element of the irreducibly social character of human life. In this attempt, the paper outlines and justifies a historical materialist perspective through critical engagement with positivist and humanist approaches. It is then argued that false conceptions of people and Nature in geography are grounded in the structure and selfunderstanding of our own society such that a critique of these ideas becomes a critique of our society.     

The neoliberal elephant: Exploring the impacts of the trade ban in ivory on the commodification and neoliberalisation of elephants

This paper uses a case study that explores the impacts of the ivory trade ban on elephant management in Namibia to illuminate the processes and complexities associated with the commodification and neoliberalisation of nature. The paper demonstrates that the ivory trade ban neither prevents the commodification of elephants, nor hampers the neoliberalisation of nature. By tracing Namibia’s experience associated with applying market based approaches to elephant conservation, this paper highlights that the ivory trade ban is only one obstacle among many which prevent the commodification of the ‘living’ elephant. Analysing Namibia’s experiences alongside the wider debates informing elephant conservation reveals that actors of preservation and sustainable utilisation produce elephants. In particular, during the events leading up to the 1989 ivory trade ban, advocates of preservation produced a very lucrative representation of the elephant that relies on market mechanisms. This image has become a powerful commodity that competes with parts of the biophysical elephant (particularly its ivory) and therefore creates new and contesting ways in which elephants can be commodified.