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The globalization of firms is shaped at multiple scales by interdependencies and connections between places. The degree to which firm strategic behavior is global depends on capitalist variegation that reflects national particularity and path dependence linked to underlying global industry restructuring. This article develops an analytical framework for studying spatial differentiation of sectoral modes of variegated capitalism by applying a world city networks (WCN) approach to a highly globalized economic sector. It applies social network analysis to 24,299 intrafirm ties of 2,121 oil and gas firms in Russia and Australia linking 1,339 cities. An analysis of national networks, as they were in 2019, showed an introverted and centralized city network structure in Russia. Ties to domestic production centers and strategic geopolitical partners were strongly focused on Moscow, reflecting Russia’s state capitalism and the Soviet legacy of the state-led planning. In contrast, the liberal market orientation of Australia showed an extroverted and decentralized network, with strong links between Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and international energy hubs, global cities, and tax havens. We conclude that studying sectoral city network structures provides a more nuanced appreciation of economic processes as artifacts of embedded politico-territorial relations as they reflect the underlying role of the state affecting the strategic behavior of firms, essentially profiling sectoral modes of variegated capitalisms. This article seeks to enhance engagement by economic geographers with WCN research, by providing a novel comparative framework for capturing and interpreting uneven (variegated) spatial outcomes of diverse political–institutional contexts vis-a-vis specialized economic activity. By establishing a dialogue with variegated capitalisms literature, we extend the ongoing debates over how politico-territorial and sectoral relations contribute to city networks formation.

The period leading up to and following the global financial crisis has been characterized by rising global financial diversity and multipolarity, a process underscored by the growth of so-called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date there has not been any systematic examination of the interactions between this rising global financial diversity and national economic institutional diversity. Here I apply an institutional “comparative capitalisms” perspective to the analysis of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) SWF investment in German industry since the onset of the global financial crisis. The evidence demonstrates that a growing number of German industrial firms—particularly the major automotive firms at the heart of German industry—have recruited long-term GCC SWF investment as an adaptive response to the stresses of financial restructuring, most importantly the appearance of hostile takeovers as a feature of the German corporate governance landscape. These patterns lend partial support to “varieties of capitalism” (VOC) arguments that institutional complementarity and comparative institutional advantage are likely to produce path dependent trajectories of national institutional evolution. They also lend partial support to critiques of VOC, emphasizing, on the one hand, the importance of the Polanyian “double movement” of market expansion and containment and, on the other, the transnational foundations of national institutional diversity. I conclude that to fully explain these patterns, both VOC theories of institutional complementarity and comparative advantage, and Polanyian theories of the double movement, must be grounded in a “generalized Darwinian” analysis of population-level selection dynamics.

In the literature on global commodity chains, industrial upgrading describes the process whereby firms shift to more secure or more profitable niches within or between industries through organizati...

Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains of fresh vegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focusing on the supply chain relationships and practices among exporters and smallholder farmers. In so doing, I seek to highlight the often-contested nature of the implementation of standards in social fields that are marked by different and distributed principles of evaluating quality, production processes, and legitimate actions in the marketplace. I also reconstruct the challenges and opportunities that exporters and farmers are facing with regard to the implementation of and compliance with standards. Finally, I elaborate on the scope for action that producers and policymakers have under these structures to retain sectoral competitiveness in a global economy of qualities.

This article presents a critical commentary on the development, through restructuring, of the Chicago economy in the period since the onset of deindustrialization in the early 1980s. Adapting an innovative methodology for the measurement of labor-market inequalities over time at the metropolitan scale, the article provides an empirical analysis of the city's new mode of growth. A notable feature is an entrenched and deepening pattern of wage inequality in Chicago, which is distinctive from that evident at the national level. Closer attention should be paid to what have proved to be extended processes of economic transformation at the urban scale, the social and geographic contours of which have yet to be adequately mapped.

The process of international economic integration in which multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a significant orchestrating role is a contradictory one of a space of flows, on the one hand, and a space of places, on the other hand. It is this contradiction that produces a variegated landscape of relations within and among MNEs and a whole range of territorially rooted organizations and institutions. As a result, interest in global production networks, as part of a broader relational turn in economic geography, has sought to highlight and uncover these webs of relations within which MNEs are embedded. In reviewing this literature, we emphasize the economic imperatives underlying such relations or, rather, their political-economic nature and the discontinuities in industrial restructuring they can produce. We then present an empirical illustration of these points and some of the key concerns within the literature on global production networks. We consider a recent round of restructuring by Black & Decker Corporation, focusing on the politico-economic ramifications of closing one of two European factories. Our reading of the literature, coupled with our empirical findings, suggests the continuing tendency for international integration as a space of flows to eclipse the coherence of places. Localized points of resistance can moderate the powers exercised by MNEs internally and across a network of organizations, although there are limits to the transferability of such tactics of resistance.

An “institutional trap”is a sequence of misplaced regulatory steps that have increased the costs of institutional transformation to the level at which inefficient structures can remain stable, despite changes in the external economic environment. This is a common occurrence in Central and Eastern Europe because of the path-dependent nature of the postsocialist transformation process. This article examines the organizational and territorial transformations of housing, utility, and social welfare policies in the Czech Republic through a comparative analysis of institutional power geometries and household expenditures at the national scale. The results indicate that the Czech Republic is facing an institutional trap in the restructuring of its rent control and social welfare policies. The trap operates within three nested circuits: the power geometries of postsocialist reforms, the geographies of housing prices and social welfare, and the consumption patterns of disadvantaged households. The lock-in ...

Taking as its point of departure recent debates on the theoretical status of scale and rescaling in political-economic geography, this article explores the scalar politics of neoliberal workfare. This tendentially hegemonic form of neoliberal social and labor-market policy combines objectives of the dismantling of welfare and the rollback of entitlements with an insistent focus on the activation and enforcement of work. The welfare/workfare restructuring process is an illustration of a deeply politicized and highly dynamic form of regulatory rescaling, based inter alia on the selective appropriation of disembedded local programming models and their purposeful circulation around extralocal policy networks, the dumping of regulatory risks and responsibilities at the local scale and that of the “poor body,” and the complex orchestration of ostensibly decentralized policy regimes by national states and transnational agencies and intermediaries. The rollback of Keynesian-welfarist institutions at the l...

This article identifies the way in which a firm-centered, value-chain approach to studying the distinctive structure and evolution of the geography of the Italian textile and clothing industries (TCI) offers important insights that qualify the results of district-centered and commodity/value-chain research. Analyses of the functional profiles of textile and clothing companies and of the roles of design, distribution, and services help explain recent trends in industrial concentration and in the national and international fragmentation of value chains. These analyses also give rise to a view of districts as parts of an interdependent geographic division of labor that includes magic circles and delocalized zones of dependent manufacturing. An appreciation of these features of the system is vital for understanding recent trends in the performance of the TCI and the Made in Italy industries more generally.

How does information technology (IT) alter the organizational dynamics in an industry? In this article, we examine changes in competition and interfirm relations in the U.S. logistics industry, particularly whether “trust-base” interfirm relationships are being substituted by “competition-base” relationships and the rationale for outsourcing. We also examine how new IT tools and outsourcing interact and how logistics contracts, the size of firms, and knowledge lead to integration or disintegration within the industry. The results of our research demonstrate that while the use of IT tools is widespread, traditional trust-based relationships exhibit a considerable resilience in the logistics industry. The industry is also undergoing a complex process of restructuring in response to technological change, on the one hand, and the persistence of geographic and functional specialization, on the other hand. The industry’s focus on the delivery of high-quality services, coupled with excess capacity in the...

In this paper we concentrate on a neglected process in the restructuring of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the formation of spatial divisions of labor. Existing conceptions of interlocality competition for mobile investment and spatial divisions of labor center on the dynamics of new greenfield investment. We provide instead an exploratory analysis of interlocality competition centered on intracorpo-rate competition for repeat investment, broadly defined. We draw together diverse strands of literature to develop a simple taxonomy of types of intracorporate competition, exploring some of the implications of competition for successful MNE affiliates and their host localities. We go on to illustrate these ideas with reference to case studies of manufacturing affiliates of MNEs in an older industrial region of Wales. Although many of the repeat investments of MNEs are in principle contestable, the discussion and the case studies stress the difficulties faced by affiliates and localities at the p...

This article advances the argument that economic geography has prioritized the understanding of processes over the evaluation of outcomes. Contemporary research on globalization—like earlier studies of industrial restructuring, deindustrialization, and “localities”—tends to address outcomes only in so far as they shed light on underlying processes. Yet the earlier generation of research also produced a number of instructive methodological and epistemological critiques that now frame current attempts to understand the socioenvironmental effects of globalization. Three of these challenges are outlined in the context of research on the environmental effects of foreign direct investment: linking processes with outcomes; bridging across scales; and demonstrating the “difference that difference makes.” The article contrasts the limited engagement by economic geographers with globalization's environmental effects with a growing body of work outside geography. Preliminary links between this well-developed, external literature and proximate bodies of geographic scholarship are put forth to demonstrate how hybrid approaches may best be able to capture the ways in which processes of economic globalization drive environmental outcomes. The article concludes with a worked example of ongoing research into the environmental impacts of foreign direct investment to illustrate how such an approach may engage globalization “on the ground.”

The Yorkshire drought of 1995 was the most extreme climate event faced by the English and Welsh water industry since its privatization in 1989. As an emblem of crisis in privatized water management, and as a potential signal of climate change, the 1995 drought has motivated change in water regulation and management. In this paper I challenge conventional interpretations of the 1995 water supply crisis as a natural hazard or as a result of managerial ineptitude. Drought is conceptualized as the production of scarcity, an outcome of three interrelated practices: meteorological modeling, demand forecasting, and corporate restructuring and the regulatory “game.” These practices are situated within an analysis of the context of the regulatory implications of the privatization of the water industry in 1989. I explore the simultaneously natural, social, and discursive elements of water scarcity and situate them within an analysis of privatization as reregulation, rather than deregulation. This analysis brings insights developed in debates over “real” regulation and regulation theory to bear on nature-society analysis, while extending this debate through theorizing regulation as, in part, a discursive practice. The ensuing rereading of drought challenges conventional interpretations of environmental crisis, raises questions about the implications of water industry privatization, and emphasizes the need to account for the role of the state and the intricacies of “real” regulation in analyses of resource management.

I examine how different dimensions of restructuring are related to gender wage inequality. The analysis extends research on regional wage differentials to include differentials between men and women in two educational groups at opposite ends of the educational hierarchy. Relative wages across regional labor markets in the United States are modeled in a multilevel framework as outcomes of variation in economic conditions associated with restructuring. Using microdata from the 1990 PUMS-A 5 percent census files, as well as independent sources of macro-data on counties, I show that the direction of wage changes associated with each dimension of restructuring generally does not differ by gender or education. Wages are either higher or lower than the average labor market for all groups. However, there are significant differences in relative wages by gender and many important differences between the two educational groups in the spatial distribution of gender wage inequality. Several “spatial routes” to gender wage equality emerge that differ from the dominant temporal explanations of the declining gender wage gap and differ according to the educational background of workers.

The goal of this paper is to link the development of union training initiatives and their relationship to state labor market policy to an emerging literature on trade unions in industrial geography. In particular, I examine labor’s involvement in state policy in Canada and consider the impact it has had on the direction of these initiatives at the federal, provincial, and sectoral levels, with particular reference to the Canadian Labor Force Development Board (CLFDB), the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB), and sectoral training initiatives by the Canadian Auto Workers and the United Steel Workers of America. Researchers in geography and industrial relations have linked post-Fordism to an enhancement of local union strategies and have suggested that one possible configuration of skill development under an emerging Schumpeterian Workfare State would include labor as an important stakeholder—especially at the regional level in a high-skill/high-wage virtuous circle of development. However,...

A household-level analysis helps to reveal the dynamics of a transition in Mexican industrial strategy from the state-led import substitution strategy dominant from 1930 to 1976 to the neoliberal one dominant today. The results suggest that gender restructuring was a crucial element of industrial restructuring. The new industrial strategy which relies on substantial foreign investment and adopts many of the norms of maquiladora production has reshaped the industrial household into a multitude of forms. In the case study presented these range from huge company-run single-sex dormitories to a variety of extended family households. In these new households the gender division of domestic labor has been renegotiated. In-depth interviews reveal that such micro-scale struggles result from and influence the new factory regime. (EXCERPT)

The recent period of crisis and adjustment in Latin America and the Caribbean is fueling a fundamentally gendered process of labor force restructuring in both agriculture and industry. An analysis of ongoing changes in the Dominican Republic finds that one of the most striking shifts in the labor market landscape involves women’s increasing incorporation into nontraditional agriculture and export manufacturing. The Dominican state and corporations collaborate in devaluing and harnessing women’s labor in these sectors, enhancing private profits and the success of exportled development strategies.This study deepens our understanding of gendered labor force restructuring by analyzing the rarely noted, but substantial, incorporation of women in new agro-enterprises and by comparing the ways in which a female labor force has been actively constructed in nontraditional agriculture with more familiar patterns in export manufacturing. Firms in both sectors rely on women to fulfill labor-intensive and exac...

Economic reform in China since the late 1970s has led to remarkable economic growth and many changes in China's economic geography. Privatization, an important process in deregulating a centrally controlled economy, has been a significant component of China's economic reform and restructuring. Privatization also has significant spatial consequences linked to its role in China's regional economic development. With data from policy documents and state statistical sources, we use descriptive statistics and correlation analysis to describe, map, analyze, and explain the changing spatial dimensions of China's privatization process. A complex pattern of spatial variation in privatization has emerged related to the recent historical legacy of socialist development and new economic opportunities in different regions. Empirical analysis shows that unemployment was influential to privatization in the late 1970s, but in the 1990s, strong state employment in the commercial sector has been associated with the growth of the urban private sector. Moreover, it is geographically significant that the stronger the private sector at the provincial level, the faster the province's economic growth. Findings on the spatial variation and changes of privatization enhance our understanding of the complex processes of regional development under way in China today and can contribute to the formulation of innovative regional development policies.

Recent inquiry in urban studies highlights the dynamic restructuring of urban areas, with new elements of the landscape taken as reflections of sweeping economic and sociocultural change. American cities are portrayed as “galactic” and “restless” manifestations of global and national industrial restructuring, widening income inequality, demographic shifts, and the cultural sensibilities of new class formations. Yet the persistence of residential segregation and suburban development processes provide reminders of the historical continuity of American urban form. This paper critically evaluates continuity and change in the urban landscape, drawing on feminist urban research and theories of residential differentiation to analyze changes in spatial segregation among families and households. I apply the methods of the classical factorial ecology literature to a special census tabulation that controls for tract boundary changes between 1980 and 1990. The analysis focuses on Minneapolis–St. Paul, which e...

In this paper we explain why the modern corporation may persist with a decentralized system of plants differentiated by the vintage of capital and the style of management. Our goal is to show how and why firms are, at once, structured by the inherited configuration of capital and also reproduce differentiation within and outside the corporation. To do so, we use concepts and principles drawn from mod- em financial theory to show that a spatially differentiated configuration of produc- tion may have advantages for the firm in terms of the risk-adjusted flow of revenue, strategic options in relation to actual and potential competitors, and the manage- ment of sunk costs. Our argument focuses on the moder corporation, character- ized by a separation between ownership and control as well as a dependence upon internal stakeholders for the realization of planned revenue and output targets. We argue that our framework can help theorists account for the persistence of inter- firm and interindustry differences in capital profiles, despite a common presump- tion in favor of convergence around a simple, efficient industry standard. While the paper is an exercise in theory, it is based upon our previously published studies of corporate restructuring in manufacturing and retail industries in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Los Angeles is an oft-cited example where recent political, economic, technological, and demographic changes are all seen as leading to urban restruc- turing, including restructuring of class relations. Shaped like an hourglass-with well-paid white professionals and producer service workers at the top, low-paid non-union immigrants and consumer service workers at the bottom, and a squeezed middle-the new class structure is manifest in the city as spatial polar- ization, a central feature of postmodern urbanism. With this restructuring has come a decline of class-based politics. Progressive political response ranges from a nor- mative reassertion of class-based politics to their abandonment in favor of "new" post-class identities and struggles. This paper presents a middle ground between reassertion versus abandonment of class-based politics based on a threefold rethinking of the concept of class in this literature. An alternative "mapping" is pre- sented, using U.S. census data for Los Angeles, siting a variety of class relations (capitalist, independent, feudal, communal) as spatially ubiquitous rather than polarized across the landscape. Each of these relations is understood as one in the contradictory ensemble of class and nonclass positions people occupy, complexly conditioning their identities and struggles. The paper concludes with a discussion of class relations and struggles in two seemingly polarized urban places, Malibu and Fontana, highlighting some political implications of this alternative mapping.

Manual work in British local authorities has been substantially restructured since the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) in 1988. The central argument of the paper is that CCT has led to an increasing fragmentation of work, employment, and labor markets. Drawing primarily upon interviews with cleaning and catering employees in three case study councils, I demonstrate that labor forces are now highly diversified as wage and other divisions have emerged among groups of workers both between and within different local labor markets. The employment experiences of individual workers also have become fragmented. Not only is job tenure limited to the length of a contract, but also private contractors frequently seek to alter employees’ terms and conditions of work during the life of the contract itself. Additionally, many cleaning and catering workers must now combine multiple part-time, frequently insecure jobs in an attempt to obtain a living wage. Extending the work of Mingione, th...

This paper analyzes governance and politics in Massachusetts in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a regulationist analysis of the “mode of social regulation” as well as urban regime theory's emphasis on governing coalitions, we show how spatial restructuring has transformed governing coalitions, governance structures, and local politics. Empirically, we note the importance of the Greater Boston area to the Commonwealth's recent economic recovery but point to the lack of regional governance capacity. Political fragmentation and territorial conflict continue to frustrate the development of more coherent governing coalitions and governance structures at the state, regional, and local levels. Theoretically, we stress how conditions internal to local economies contribute to their structural incoherence. This contrasts with the regulationist emphasis on external conditions, including globalization and the failure of national states to manage uneven development.

This book contributes to research on Chinese who are living outside China, a corpus that has steadily expanded since the mid-1960s. Ma’s introductory essay clearly sets out the historical periodicity of the explosion of population from China as part of global push-pull movements reflecting early efforts to escape domestic rebellions by building railroads. The migration flow, which was unleashed in the watershed restructuring year of 1965, has culminated in the contemporary bifurcation, from highly educated aspirants to desperate “container migrants” following shady “snake heads.” Schools of theoretical explanations and classifications of migration are also set out, along with their shortcomings for dealing with the complexity of the Chinese experience. Well-published authors who are conversant in their geographic locales, including Cindy Fan on Los Angeles, Sen-dou Chang on Hawaii, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh on Singapore, David Lai on the Canadian experience, and Jack Williams on the Taiwanese as hua ch’iao, contribute meaty and thoughtful essays that touch on the varied nature of receiving areas.

Restructuring in the global apple market is leading to a pronounced tightening in the competitive spaces occupied by Southern Hemisphere producers. For New Zealand and Chile, the world's two most successful apple-exporting countries, significant challenges are presented by projected industry trends, such as declining profitability in the global industry, increased world production, and the continued static demand in key markets. In particular, falling prices in Europe and North America for many key varieties and concomitant lower returns to growers are threatening serious and pervasive impacts. This article explores some of these challenges in the context of the significantly different positions occupied by New Zealand and Chile within the global fresh fruit and vegetable complex. An analysis of the two countries' industries, particularly comparing issues of regulation and innovative varietal development, shows that global food complexes have highly variable spatial expressions, given their process-based nature and underlying dynamics of contestation. Focusing on the increased competition between the New Zealand and Chilean apple industries, the discussion sheds light on wider emerging competitive dynamics within the global fruit industry. The example of the recent Pacific Rose crisis, which involved Chilean “theft” of an exclusive New Zealand apple variety, is used to illustrate the emergence of “jungle law” in the Southern Hemisphere apple industries.

This text examines the limits and scope of regional capitalist development, documenting the nature and causes of uneven development in Slovakia. It addresses industrial and restructuring strategies, arguing that current progress must be understood within the context of the past and that the present complex mid of old and new economic and institutional structures contribute significantly to economic fragmentation and divergence. The book focuses on regional and economic change in Eastern and Central Europe, using Slovakia as a case study. It explains the relationship between industrial change and regional development and discusses fragmentation within the context of the legacy of the state socialist industralization model.

Partial table of contents: TOWARDS THE NEW EUROPE. New Europe or New Europes? East-West Development Dynamics in the Twentieth Century (D. Pinder). ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION. Europe in the World Economy (R. Gibb). Industrial Restructuring in the New Democracies (A. Dawson). Tourism and Economic Development (A. Williams & G. Shaw). Transport, Communications and European Integration (R. Vickerman). SOCIAL STRESS IN THE NEW EUROPE. Socio-Economic Change, EU Policy and Social Disadvantage (M. Samers & R. Woods). Urban Life and Social Stress (P. White). Agricultural Change and Rural Stress in the New Democracies (T. Unwin). ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES. Environmental Challenges in the New Democracies (T. Saiko). Transport, Economic Development and the Environment: Squaring the Policy Circle? (D. Pinder & J. Edwards). Conservation and the Rural Landscape (B. Woodruffe). Contributors. List of Figures. List of Tables. Index.

1. Part 1: Globalization of Production Systems: Theory 2. Introduction 3. Shut up and Dance, or is the Economy Knowable? 4. Restructuring the Production System 5. The 'Newer' International Division of Labour 6. Dissolving Difference? Money, Disembedding and the Creation of 'Global Financial Space' 7. Part II: Globalization of Production Systems: Processes 8. Information Technology and Production Systems 9. The Development of Multinational Enterprises 10. Deregulation of Markets 11. Research and Development 12. Part III: Globalization of Production Systems: Response 13. The Lead Role of Advanced Economies 14. Less Developed Economies and Dependence Trade and Developing Countries 15. The Prospects for the Post-socialist Economies 16. Part IV: Globalization of Production Systems: Space 17. Market Enlargement, the Single European Market 18. Reinventing the Region, firms, clusters and Networks in Economic Development 19. Producer Services and Competition from Offshore, US Data Entry and Banking 20. The Dominance of International Finance by London, New York and Tokyo 21. Overview and Synthesis

In recent decades organized labor in the United States has responded to restructuring of the global economy by increasing its commitment to international solidarity, providing moral and material support for the organizing efforts of workers abroad. The international labor solidarity strategy appears to be designed to lessen the competition among places over investment, plant location, and jobs by uniting workers in different countries on the basis of their shared class interests. Yet international solidarity programs may serve to benefit one geographically distinct group of workers over another without challenging capitalism's allocative mechanisms. I develop criteria for differentiating between the latter kind of solidarity campaigns, which I call accommodationist, and transformatory solidarity, which attempts to prevent capital from using space to weaken workers' organizations, thereby altering the labor-capital relationship in fundamental ways. I then examine the work of an organization of union members and workers in the United States committed to forming relationships of solidarity with workers in Guatemala. I look at the history, philosophy, and activities of the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project (US/GLEP), which provides an informative case study of the opportunities and dangers of international solidarity. The limitations of international solidarity campaigns are identified, and I suggest ways to overcome these barriers. spatial relations

Recent restructuring of the Australian dairy and wheat sectors can inform current theoretical debates on the significance of agri-food globalization. A key issue in recent debates is whether current processes lead toward a so-called “third food regime,” wherein strategies for profit capture are built around internationally coordinated flows of production, commodities, and money capital. The study outlined here suggests that there may be ongoing roles for local, farmer-owned marketing cooperatives within current globalization processes. An agenda is presented for further research into agri-food restructuring and globalization.

This research empirically investigates the pattern of employment change within the United States between 1940 and 1989 using an analysis of variance model to partition employment change into that accounted for by (1) national trends in employment, (2) place-independent, sector-specific restructuring of employment, (3) place-specific, sector-independent shifts of employment, and (4) local employment conditions. Because we are concerned with a national system of capitalism, we use regulation theory to inform our research. According to regulation theory, capitalism is marked by periodic shifts in the regime of accumulation, or periods of crisis, interspersed with periods of relative stability. Our expectation is that periods of economic crisis will be marked by high levels of sector-specific restructuring in employment, whereas spatial shifts in employment induced by diffusion and everyday competition among capitalists occur on a continuous basis. Results of the analysis indicate that, not surprisingly, significant restructuring in employment has taken place. In particular, there has been a continual increase in restructuring from the 1940s to the 1980s. A series of annual change models reveals that within this gradual increase, individual years in the 1940s and 1980s appear to play particularly important roles.

PART 1 - REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND POPULATION SYSTEMS: The Mediterranean Region: Europe's Summer Leisure Space The British Isles: Tourism and Regional Development PART 2 - SPATIAL REORGANISATION OF TOURISM: Rural Tourism: The Creation of New Rural Spaces PART 3 - TRANSNATIONALISATION: Tourism, Labour and International Migration PART 4 - NEW TOURISM PRODUCTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE: Tourism and the Environment Tourism Change in Central and Eastern Europe CONCLUSIONS: The Impact of Tourism on the Restructuring of European Space.

rural geography differs in that the category "rural" is no longer conceived as naively given and distinct. Rather, rural phenomena are produced from the same range of social processes as other phenomena, and studying them requires the same theoretical understandings. This requires a redefinition of the possible pathways of rural social transformation and the ways that rural areas are integrated into global restructuring. Most simply, the distinctions commonly drawn between rural and urban places, or between production and consumption, are called into question. What happens in rural areas can no longer be considered insulated from or irrelevant to

Research within industrial geography has illuminated the relationship between the restructuring of manufacturing and the reshaping of urban space. Industrial geographers have paid little attention, however, to the dramatic social and economic changes occurring throughout rural America. I contend that evident sectoral and urban biases mask an underlying issue: a persistent conceptual schism between agriculture and industry, in which agriculture is comparatively undertheorized as an arena of capitalist development. As a result, a significant part of the story of economic restructuring—the transformation of farming and the creation of new forms of rural development—remains largely unexamined. This paper sets out to bridge the gap separating industry from agriculture and thereby begins to recover this lost side of industrial restructuring. I argue that the incorporation of agriculture into industrial geography involves much more than a simple mapping of industrial theory onto farm terrain; it requires...

Industrial restructuring in the primary sector highlights the continued exploitation of economies of scale, vertical integration, and oligopolistic competition. A few large vertically integrated firms wield power and control over material sources and production facilities. Restructuring of the copper industry in Arizona illustrates the interaction of changing corporate strategies and shifting market structures in primary production. A weakening of the global copper oligopoly disrupted supply/demand adjustment mechanisms following a wave of nationalizations of copper producing properties in South America and Africa in the early 1970s. The resultant depression in prices forced firms in Arizona to restructure. Changes in technological processes and labor relations eliminated large numbers of jobs, redefined work processes, crushed union vigor, revitalized labor productivity, and substantially lessened production costs. Firms that survived the reorganization held specialized core skills in copper that compelled and enabled them to restore capital accumulation. They consolidated assets and intensified vertical integration. A long-term strategic objective of international mining companies, including Arizona's copper firms, is to restore the structure of the global copper oligopoly through new investments in Chile and Peru. Realizing this goal is possible due to the reassertion of capitalistic production principles throughout Latin America and the reinvigoration of international mining firms.

Preface Part I: Introduction 1. The Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring and the New Asian Immigration Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng Part II: Immigration Patterns Introduction Lucie Cheng 2. U.S. Immigration Policies and Asian Migration Paul Ong and John M. Liu 3. Pacific Rim Development and the Duality of Post-1965 Asian Immigration to the United States John M. Liu and Lucie Cheng 4. Asian Immigrants in Los Angles: Diversity and Division Paul Ong and Tania Azores Part III: Economic Incorporation Introduction Paul Ong 5. Asians in the Los Angeles Garment Industry Edna Bonacich 6. The Migration and Incorporation of Filipino Nurses Paul Ong and Tania Azores 7. Chinese-Vietnamese Entrepreneurs in California Steve Gold Part IV: Political Struggles Introduction Yen Espiritu 8. The New Chinese Immigration and the Rise of Asian American Politics in Monterey Park, California Leland T. Saito and John Horton 9. The Korean-Black Conflict and the State Paul Ong, Kye Young Part, and Yasmin Tong 10. Class Constraints on Racial Solidarity among Asian Americans Yen Espiritu and Paul Ong Conclusion Edna Bonacich, Paul Ong, and Lucie Cheng About the Editors and Contributors

Disagreements about the nature of global capitalist restructuring often arise from different conceptions of the degree to which economic practice is socially embedded. Scholars who follow an economistic view believe that sociocultural relations are either irrelevant or epiphenomenal to the location of production and circulation of capital in an advanced capitalist economy. In contrast, those who believe in the embeddedness of economic practice argue for the importance of preexisting social and spatial structures which influence all business behavior. In this work I follow the latter approach by examining a "modern" capitalist system that is deeply embedded in sociocultural relations, yet extremely successful in the contemporary international economy. I show further that the use of extended family ties, business trust, flexible credit, and the "gift" exchange of information in elite Hong Kong Chinese business society is not only relevant to contemporary economic decision making, but indeed has been particularly effective throughout the period of extensive financial deregulation and privatization of the past decade. These theoretical concerns are addressed in a case study of the investment and development of the former Expo lands in Vancouver, British Columbia, by the family of the Hong Kong property magnate Li Ka-shing.

Scientific literature on the spatial effects of socioeconomic restructuring has tended to highlight three key components in what has been considered to be the emergence of a new territorial model: the significance of subnational units (regions and cities) as the genuine ''post-Fordist'' unit of analysis; the growing prominence of service activities in the configuration of new development areas; and, finally, either the ''randomizing'' of the location of growth poles or the appearance of the social dimension as a new determinant of growth. Most studies of spatial restructuring have been confined, however, to the theoretical dimension or to case study analyses. There is a lack of large empirical cross-sectional studies on the topic. In this article, I try to discern, using a cross-sectional method, the extent to which a new growth pattern is developing in the European Community (EC) and the influence of previously existing conditions in current territorial changes in wealth levels. I conclude that a flexible production spatial model is not yet the dominant pattern. Many characteristics of the mass production system are still evident in growth trends. Furthermore, this territorial restructuring is by no means a global and homogeneous process, since it implies different transformations in core, intermediate, and lagging areas.

This paper examines the role that off-farm employment (OFE) plays in the restructuring of peasant economies. In particular we examine the incidence and pattern of labor allocation as it relates to landownership and family life cycle (FLC) stages in the Indonesian transmigration program....Using a sample of South Sumatran transmigration schemes our findings show that both size of landholdings and the life cycle stage of the family influence labor allocation decisions....The results show how landownership and other means of production can influence the trade-off between childrens education and the use of child labor at various stages in the FLC."

Economic development increasingly is a local, bottom-up phenomenon in the context of global restructuring, budget crises, and reduced funding to regions and cities. Neither the public nor private sectors can adequately plan for change alone; thus, government and business have entered into a partnership to achieve local development. To date, however, the effectiveness of many local initiatives is uncertain. Through comparative examination of different national contexts and types of places within nations, this article specifies the conditions under which we may expect development strategies to succeed. Despite similar developmental avenues in the United States and many European countries, outcomes are mediated by national context, specifically by mode of production and institutionalized industrial and labor relations. Modes of production that engender principles of cooperation and collaboration in the workplace are more likely to encourage partnership principles between government and business, as well as among firms and citizens. Within nations, however, the parameters of social relations that are defined by the national mode of production may be mediated by social relations within locales. Specifically, cooperativeness and sense of community formed and sustained through the dynamic of kin and non-kin networks are critical prerequisites to effective local development strategy, which may otherwise falter without policies to engender appropriate social relations and articulate production and consumption concerns. Contriving change may be more feasible in locales that have been shaken by crisis, dismantling the sociopolitical relations of a previous order to allow for evaluation.

Japanese investment in automobile production in North America and Western Europe during the 1980s and early 1990s posed some sharp questions about the future of domestically owned assemblers and automotive component companies. In North America, substantial expansion by Japanese parts suppliers established new locational patterns geared to producing “just-in-time” (JIT) for the Japanese “transplant” assemblers. In Western Europe, by contrast, Japanese auto manufacturers chose to work from the outset much more closely with an existing supply chain. The paper examines two questions: the extent to which JIT-stvle systems of production were emerging and the degree to which JIT production carried tendencies toward spatial clustering. The analysis focuses on parts purchasing at Japanese assembly plants in Europe and on restructuring within the European automotive components industry. I conclude that JIT is far from a universal organizational principle, but rather has different attributes according to its...

Japanese investment has set in motion a restructuring of the U.S. steel industry. This restructuring is occurring on three related geographic scales. At the global scale, Japanese investment in U.S. steel reflects a more general shift in the center of steel production technology and accumulation from the U.S. and western Europe to Japan. Japanese advances are now diffusing back to the U.S. via Japanese direct investment and organizational restructuring. At the national level, within the U.S., Japanese investment reinforces a westward shift in the center of steel production from the traditional Pittsburgh region to Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. This spatial redirection stems from the high fixed costs of integrated steel production, the importance of the automobile industry as a user of steel, and the particular requirement of supplying steel to the automotive transplants and their suppliers on a just-in-time basis. At the plant or organizational level, Japanese direct investment has set in motion a ...

From the firm through to the community and the nation, and now at the international level, economic restructuring has had profound effects on many people's welfare. Despite arguments about the necessity of restructuring, for many the use of this notion in government and business policy making is at best opportunistic and at worst deliberately exploitative. We explore the underlying bases of such judgments with reference to liberal conceptions of institutional legitimacy. Having noted a number of empirical and moral objections to restructuring, we analyze the strategies of coercion that must be used when there is principled resistance to restructuring. We focus upon economic restructuring in modern liberal democracies and upon the recent experience of Australia and the United States in particular. In the conclusion, we evaluate the efficacy of our analytical framework, recognizing important qualifications about the utility of rational choice theory.

This paper examines the changing regional geography of wages within the United States during the recent period of economic and employment restructuring. Economic restructuring has been accompanied by widespread attempts to reduce direct wage costs and, more generally, by a realignment of labor relations away from union negotiated wage agreements. We investigate the geography of wage change, using hourly wage data drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics' Area Wage Surveys. Our analysis provides little evidence of an erosion of real wage differentials at the scale of census regions. Rather, the tendency is towards increasing intraregional variance in wages, especially within the north central United States, reflecting the geographically uneven effects of restructuring within regions.

During the last 30 years, U.S. metropolitan economies have experienced tremendous restructuring, and the locations of corporate headquarters have increasingly exhibited spatial shifts, both deconcentrating and dispersing. Theoretical explanations have suggested that the United States is entering the third of four stages, in which we are now witnessing the drive to regional maturity with no dominant regional center. Changes in the distribution of metropolitan corporate dominance between 1980 and 1987 are examined and related to two sets of explanatory frameworks, one spatial and the other structural. Changes in metropolitan corporate dominance were strongly related to spatial shifts in headquarters and asset location, especially shifts due to merger and acquisition activity. Changes in dominance were less strongly related to structural factors reflecting the degree of transition to the emerging service-based economy, even though population and location relative to New York were important. Finally, the effe...