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State labour inspection has been relatively underresearched in economic and labour geography, despite its prospective role in tackling worker exploitation as part of national state regulatory strategies. This paper seeks to address this gap by critically examining state labour inspection as a government function capable of upholding labour standards within and across economic space. A key contribution of the paper is to make stronger connections between workers' spatial strategies and their ability to shape how labour inspection and standards enforcement is carried out. Focusing upon the UK and Ireland, we examine different ways in which some labour-friendly groups have sought to contest but also to support state labour inspection efforts with a view to protecting workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary policies are not usually considered as part of the repertoire of 'state capitalism'. However, unconventional monetary operations performed by central banks in recent years make this exclusion increasingly problematic. This paper thus explores whether recent central bank interventions should be considered manifestations of 'new' state capitalism. Analysis focuses on the actions of three central banks from the advanced capitalist core in the West – the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. By mobilising the 'financial chains' perspective, this paper highlights the fact that, under financialisation, contemporary central banks have assumed a pivotal role in shaping Western capitalism and its uneven geographies. Through these recent unconventional interventions, central banks have in effect become 'creators' or 'generators' of (financial) capital. As such, their role in shaping uneven economic geographies across space (well beyond their official territorial boundaries) has expanded. Spatial ramifications of central banks' capital-generating operations could thus fit easily within the framework of 'uneven and combined state capitalism'. The possibility of considering the unconventional operations of central banks as state capitalist could also go hand in hand with a modified definition of state capitalism. Indeed, the rubric of state capitalism could potentially be enlarged to include configurations of capitalism where the state plays a particularly strong role not only as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital but also as a 'generator' of capital. This capital-generating role appears to be essential for the survival of contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the contributions to the review symposium on How China Escaped Shock Therapy. I discuss the strategy of economic system reform that started from the non-essential parts of the industrial system in order to eventually transform the commanding heights; the spatial dimension of reform in relation to "dual circulation" and the coastal development strategy; the nature and meaning of Chinese gradualism; and China's price stabilization strategies of the 1980s in relation to later inflationary challenges. Finally, I reflect on the symposium as a dialogue between economic geography and a history of ideas in action that I pursued in my book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a monetary perspective on capital flows and their effects on geographically uneven economic dynamics. Contributing to debates on global imbalances and the international dimension of financialisation, the paper applies heterodox theories of endogenous money creation, asset pricing, and balance sheet fragility to capital flows across regions. Three theoretical claims are made and illustrated through coherent balance-sheet accounting and empirical examples. First, trade imbalances usually are financed endogenously by net inflows that need not originate from surplus regions. Second, bank inflows are not a precondition for local credit creation, but certain types of gross financial flows can contribute to destabilising financial booms through exchange rate appreciation and asset price inflation. Third, sudden stops in capital flows can be entirely unrelated to current account deficits but may trigger financial instability, resulting in negative gross flows rather than increased outflows. For debates in economic geography and heterodox economics, the arguments imply that the focus on surplus countries as originators of destabilising flows can be misleading and that global financial centres are likely to be more important. More attention is needed to gross portfolio and FDI flows into asset markets rather than bank flows and net flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of state capitalism is attracting growing attention in economic geography and political economy. We contribute to the debate by exploring the authoritarian state capitalism variant whereby the state moves beyond a predominantly regulatory role and appears as the dominant actor. We take Russia to be a prominent example of authoritarian state capitalism because the central state has subjugated economy, created organisational structures and designed development strategies to serve the interests of the kleptocrat, inverting the conventional meaning of 'state capture'. The paper illustrates the centrality of the state by exploring two state-sponsored megaprojects: (i) the upgrade of the Northern Sea Route and (ii) the construction of innovation clusters (Skolkovo). In the first case, the state directs resources to the Northern Sea Route to secure Russia's control of the Arctic. In the second case, the state attempts to replicate the perceived developmental success stories of the West by fostering technology clusters. Each illustrative case offers an instructive insight into Russia's authoritarian state capitalism characterised by tensions between its own political and economic repertoires and a contentious relationship with the Western-dominated liberal capitalist world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remittances, money sent by migrants to their communities of origin, are increasingly being linked to global financial inclusion in what is being called the "financialization of remittances." This is the most recent attempt to divert remittances from "non-productive" money to savings and investments that can be mobilized for economic development. The literature that accompanies this strategy focuses on the responsibility of individuals to use remittances productively and invest wisely, and there is often an implied – and gendered - social component: if women link remittances to financial services, they will become empowered and lift themselves out of poverty. Based on ethnographic research in an Indigenous village in Oaxaca, Mexico, this paper offers empirics on the effects of remittance flows in women's everyday lives. Feminist scholars have long critiqued the universalism and abstractness of global development agendas, particularly those that preclude gender, and emanate from the Global North. Joining these critical voices and mobilizing postcolonial and feminist scholarship, this paper challenges the individualist logics and dichotomies underpinning the financialization of remittances agenda: that remittance spending is either productive or not and that women are empowered or not through linking remittances to finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central predictions of the new economic geography (NEG) is that the removal of trade barriers and other such frictions should lead to the geographical concentration and specialisation of economic activity, both between and within nations. This prediction has been used to argue that as the European Union becomes more integrated, economic activity would become more regionally concentrated and specialised. Using relative entropy measures applied to a new regional data set for the period of 1985–2019, this paper finds that between 1985 and 2000 localisation and specialisation between European countries increased to some extent but with a widespread fall in specialisation and concentration within countries. After 2000, and particularly after 2007 and the Global financial Crisis, the spatial distribution of economic activities in Europe appears to have become more complex, with some degree of concentration, agglomeration and specialisation both across and within countries. Overall, however, we find little long-run support for the NEG prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why some cities have been able to sustain economic growth more than others, and how particular technological or sectoral break points shift a city's economic performance favourably (or unfavourably), present ongoing conundrums. Whilst single factor accounts – such as the skilled city and the creative city – have the appeal of analytical parsimony, economic geographers suggest that a multiplicity of structures, processes and events typically sit behind how growth originates and is subsequently shaped. Given such complexity, how can we develop appropriate approaches to theorising causality within urban economic systems? This paper presents the case that critical realism may perform a useful ground-clearing role. With a layered ontology at its core, coupled with recent literature providing greater guidance for empirical application, it is argued that critical realism may present a complementary explanatory perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What "counts" as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel approach to capture 'buzz', the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. Building on a conceptual framework based on relational economic geography, we argue the content of buzz may allow to probe into the character of places and investigate what is 'in the air' within regional entrepreneurial milieux. In particular, we analyse big data to listen for the presence of buzz about innovation – defined by discursive practices that reflect an innovative atmosphere – and explore how this may influence regional firm creation. Using information from 180 million geolocated Tweets comprising almost two billion words across NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer novel evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes. The findings contribute to the literature on the intangible dimensions in the geography of innovation and offer new insights on the potential of natural language processing for economic geography research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the economic practices of maker spaces – open workshops that have increased in number over recent years and that aim to provide access to tools, materials and skills for small-scale manufacturing and repair. Scholarly interest in such spaces has been increasing across the social sciences more broadly, parallel to a growing interest in craft and making in economic geography. However, to rectify the 'capitalocentrism' of much existing work, the paper examines the case of a workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, through the dual theoretical lens of diverse economies and social practice theory. This conceptual approach sees the space as a novel form of economic 'being-in-common', providing diverse and contradictory opportunities for post-capitalist practice. The paper draws conclusions regarding the limits and potential of such spaces for sowing the prefigurative seeds for a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies highlight the emergence of standards, including multi-stakeholder initiatives developed and applied within the global South where supplier firms are usually based. This trend has created a complex ethical terrain whereby transnational standards flow through global production networks and intersect with domestic initiatives at places of production. The paper complements global production network analysis with the concepts of 'space of flows' and 'space of places' and insights from relational economic geography, to examine how some multi-stakeholder initiatives in the global South can shape the broader governance of labour standards in global production networks. The following questions are addressed: How is the governance of labour standards in global production networks shaped by dynamic spatial interactions between actors? What role have diverse Southern multi-stakeholder initiatives played in influencing the governance of South African fruit and wine? We draw on research conducted over seven years into two standards in South Africa, the Wine and Agriculture Ethical Trade Association and Sustainability Initiative of South Africa. Our analysis shows that these two Southern-based multi-stakeholder initiatives contributed to shaping the broader governance of labour standards through dynamic non-linear waves of interaction over time, involving both collaborative and contested exchanges between actors across space of flows and places. We further argue that despite the development of multi-stakeholder initiatives by Southern actors, commercial power asymmetries in global production networks limit their ability to promote significant improvements for producers and workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of spatial hierarchical processes displays fascinating images of the evolution of attraction basins of towns. Assuming in the present paper a random character of such complex processes, gravitational modeling is employed to depict changes in the nature of fuzzy boundaries between attraction basins in a hexagonal world, i.e. the geographical pattern central in the renowned and influential Christaller–Lösch central place theory in geography. The paper presents various interesting stylized maps of such stochastic processes. Our findings demonstrate that the collective behavior of actors in geographic space shows a white noise pattern that mirrors a fuzzy gravitation towards large population concentrations. These results support the validity of the conventional central place theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers accepted for publication in this themed issue reflect to a large extent the long-needed move toward recognizing the importance of a focus on tensions and contradictions as dualities. In this commentary, I will recap the tensions addressed not only in these papers but also in the commentary by Grabher and inquire into how they address them, for instance by unearthing the concepts these authors mobilize to theorize them. I will conclude that, from an organization theory perspective, economic geography seems to be on a good way to a more balanced and conflict-sensitive, even dialectical process understanding of creativity and organization that could well be pushed a little further in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some sympathetic critics have recently found trouble with the latest iteration of the global production networks theory (GPN 2.0) developed in economic geography. I term these immanent critiques "GPN trouble" and address them in this Exchanges paper in relation to GPN 2.0's conceptualization of value and risk and its perceived "missing" elements of the state, labour, and so on. Reiterating briefly its core tenet, I first demonstrate GPN 2.0's modest role as a meso theory of industrial organization and economic development in an interconnected world economy. I argue that empirical analysis based on GPN 2.0 must open up the "black box" of production networks in order to evaluate the causal links between network dynamics and uneven development outcomes. Second, I show how understanding these causal links can provide better answers to the crucial question of "in what sense a GPN problem?" Addressing both issues appropriately will likely reduce the sort of "GPN trouble" one might encounter in future research on global economic restructuring during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the introduction to the first-ever special issue on the spatial dimensions of FinTech, we show that despite a FinTech fever in business and media, research on FinTech is still niche, particularly in social sciences. We describe FinTech as a research area full of controversies, ripe and in need of geographical research. As we outline, papers in this issue contribute to the debate primarily by examining the role of the state, financial centres and uneven development in FinTech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it is important to maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline. In this paper, we argue that the ways in which evolutionary economic geography impacts strategic coupling in global financial networks are crucial to grasp tomorrow's geographies of Fintech. Through an in-depth examination of Brussels, we analyse the potential of Fintech opening a window of locational opportunity in financial services. Belgium has put together a strategy to seize this window by leveraging its politically neutral image and Brussels' existing niche in financial collaboration and infrastructural plumbing. The latter status is exemplified by the presence of global players SWIFT and Euroclear. We analyse how Belgian entrepreneurs and politicians assess Brussels' locational resources, and strategically couple big financial institutions with small tech startups in order to cultivate a Fintech ecosystem in the service of incumbent finance, constituting a Fin-Tech-State triangle. As such, we document and analyse how the coalescence of finance and technology offers new opportunities for second-tier financial centres, while highlighting the difficulties in reaping these in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for rethinking the economic geography of sharing and making in light of the recent proliferation of open innovation, makerspaces and maker movements. Using empirical research from an example of one such makerspace – Manchester's FabLab – and engaging with a range of geographical literatures on making, sharing economies, and digital fabrication, we develop a critical account of sharing in principle and in practice. The portrayal of open innovation spaces, such as FabLabs, as novel makerspaces of alterity and sharing is a common and underpinning theme in both academic and marketing literature (Aldrich, 2014; Anderson, 2012; Doherty, 2012; Fab Foundation, 2012; Gershenfeld, 2005; Suire, 2019). However, our findings suggest that the values espoused by the FabLab, of involvement, connection and affinity, are quite literally being revised and rejected by makers who use the space. Time, labour and knowledge were for the most part described by participants as precious commodities to be savoured rather than shared. Thus, while sharing is an ordinarily economic practice, this does not mean it is always, inevitably or evenly employed by economic actors and communities, especially within counter-cultural networks. If these are to be the economies of the future, we implore economic geographers to critically engage further with the complexities of and within maker spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in the popular and academic discourse surrounding 'the future of work'. In this article we offer a critical synthesis of emerging research from feminist economic geography to propose a series of questions about the future of work, conceptualized as both an object of intellectual inquiry and an emerging empirical reality. Feminist economic geography emphasizes difference, embodiment, and conceives of workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces, an emphasis which can help recenter discussions about the future of work on workers and their experience of work. Our discussion features a series of analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers, organized around three critical questions: Who are the subjects of the future of work? What counts as work? And where should we look? We highlight a broad concept of work developed through debates among feminist scholars across disciplinary fields as a key frame for understanding the global economy, including difference, social reproduction, and the spatial division of labor. Feminist economic geographers are pluralizing the subjects, forms, and geographies of work, which may help enhance our understanding of the future of work in economic geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the "fictitious commodities" of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a "farming without farmers" model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and "overflow" that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many emphasize the supposed frictionlessness and instantaneity of global financial flows, economic geographers have done important work placing globalization in concrete practices and spaces. Yet, cross-border payment transactions, which are constitutive of transnational markets, remain understudied. In this paper, I use creditor litigation against Argentina as a lens through which to explore material geographies of transnational financial payments. This litigation sheds light on the fundamental role of law (especially US common law) in structuring most major payment transactions today. Payment "flows" are not continuous at all, but rather legally divided into discrete spatial segments—and remapping these divisions, via litigation, has become a focal point of struggle between creditors and debtors, as well as among financiers. Fierce debates over contracts and their interpretation have been central in these battles. Furthermore, these financial geographies remain inextricably entangled not only with business actors, but with legal and political actors as well—law anchors economic geographies in state spaces and (often contradictory) state interests at a variety of scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 Affordable Homes Programme introduced dramatic reductions in the level of government grant for new-build construction by housing associations, with an expectation that associations' rents would rise towards market rates to compensate. Through this paper, I explore London-based associations' use of cross-subsidy from commercial sale and rental operations to ameliorate the push towards higher rents for social housing. I characterize the spatially variegated response to the Affordable Homes Programme as 'asymmetric marketization'. The case illustrates the value of bridging between economic geography literatures that acknowledge spatial variation in state–market constellations but offers less developed insights on modes of marketization, and political science literature on the regulatory state that offers a useful framework for disaggregating between modes of marketization but which has overlooked the issue of spatial variation. The significance of this asymmetric marketization is heightened by ongoing concerns over the sustainability of London-based housing associations' commercial activities, and by the possible extension of commercial-to-social cross-subsidization across other national housing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Jamie Peck’s remit for this initial set of Exchanges section contributions to present forward-positive approaches to economic geography, I offer American philosophical pragmatism, and more specifically, the neo-pragmatism of the American philosopher, Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Rather than providing a complete architectonic philosophy, pragmatism presents a set of ideas about ideas. Within the context of economic geography, I explore within this short paper three neo-pragmatist ideas: a reconceptualization of knowledge and truth; experimentation and creativity; and pluralism and conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent calls for the development of a more embedded sense of labour agency, this paper focuses on the scale of the workplace which is largely absent from recent labour geography debates. Drawing on studies in the labour process tradition, the paper presents empirical research on call centre work in Glasgow, utilising this to revisit the concept of local Labour Control Regimes. We argue that rather than being simply imposed by capital and the state ‘from above’, workplace control should be seen as the product of a dialectical process of interaction and negotiation between management and labour. Labour's indeterminacy can influence capital in case specific ways as firms adapt to labour agency and selectively tolerate and collude with certain practices and behaviours. Workers’ learned behaviours and identities are shown to affect not only recruitment patterns in unexpected ways, but also modes of accepted conduct in call centres. Accordingly, the case is made for the influence of subtle – yet pervasive – worker agency expressed at the micro-scale of the labour process itself. This, it is argued, exerts a degree of ‘bottom-up’ pressure on key fractions of capital within the local Labour Control Regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that we need to pay more attention to the spaces in which the (knowledge) economy operates and industry sectors are brought into being. Following research that examines the performative nature of the economy, the paper sees the trade show as not merely a reflection of an industry sector, but as a space that produces it into being. Looking at the Global Mobility Industry, an industry directed towards the management of expatriates, the paper uses narratives to uncover performance as a way to understand the practice of knowledge, specifically benchmarking about talent management, at the Expat Show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries' social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of how to address geographical incompatibility between aggregate statistical data sources is one affecting researchers in many countries. The increased amount of data from recent British Population Censuses has been accompanied by considerable changes in both administrative and electoral boundaries as well as those of areas specifically defined for census data collection and statistical output purposes. This paper reviews the extent of geographical inconsistency at different spatial scales and outlines the development of a web-based interface that implements an intelligent areal interpolation (dasymetric mapping) algorithm that enables estimates of census counts to be obtained for consistent spatial units across pairs of recent British censuses (1981,1991, and 2001). A limited-access user trial has been carried out and the paper illustrates a typical user query that seeks to estimate 1981 population counts in 1991 enumeration district boundaries. The paper concludes by considering further development of the interface, its incorporation into the services provided by existing census data units in the UK, and its wider potential for addressing the issues of geographical incompatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores time-persistence in interregional differences of self-employment rates in England and Wales in the 1921–2011 period by using census data. The results suggest a strong path-dependence in entrepreneurship as past self-employment rates have strong bearing on future ones. However, there is also some rank mobility reflected in the upward movements of London boroughs and downward movements of primarily coastal areas. Rank mobility relates to structural changes, changes in human capital, regional age structures and immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studies together with economic geography and social theory, this paper contextualizes corporate crowdsourcing in regimes of work and specifies and examines the rationalities governing this early 21st century round of exploitation. I refer to “rationalities” in the Foucauldian sense as the calculated ways by which mentalities become inscribed in a regime of practices, in this case, new practices of work. I present crowdsourcing as the means by which the regime of labor is governed in novel systems of production regarding open innovation as well as non-innovative yet skilled microtasks. I engage firm rationalities of decentralization, which have developed differently for innovative and non-innovative activity; wageless work; JIT labor (distinct from JIT production); precarization; informalization; fungibility; and invisibility. In the penultimate section, I draw from Foucault’s conceptualization of human capital to address rationalities of self-governance among workers, a crucial issue because it is the crowd’s willingness to accept as little as nothing that fuels the new exploitation, an insidiously efficient governmentality. I question an assumed homogenized subjectivity among the “cybertariat,” and conclude with thoughts about critical ingredients for a new, virtual frontier of resistance strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the discourse for a proactive thinking of futurity, intimately concerned with technology, which comes to an influential fruition in the discussion and representation of 'ubiquitous computing'. The imagination, proposal, or playing out of ubiquitous computing environments are bound up with particular ways of constructing futurity. This paper charts the techniques used in ubiquitous computing development to negotiate that futurity. In so doing, it engages with recent geographical debates around anticipation and futurity. The discussion accordingly proceeds in four parts. First, the spatial imagination engendered by the development of ubiquitous computing is explored. Second, particular techniques in ubiquitous computing research and development for anticipating future technology use, and their limits, are discussed through empirical findings. Third, anticipatory knowledge is explored as the basis for stable means of future orientation, which both generates and derives from the techniques for anticipating futures. Fourth, the importance of studying future orientation is situated in relation to the somewhat contradictory nature of anticipatory knowledges of ubicomp and related forms of spatial imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how efforts to understand, present, and act upon the futures of inflation participate in the governance of contemporary economic life. The point of departure is the claim that inflation is both an economic and an affective fact, subsisting as a potentially disruptive event within contemporary liberal democracies whose chief concern is to secure the conditions for the value-activating process of economic growth. Understanding efforts to secure these conditions requires attention to the anticipatory processes through which the futures of inflation are generatively disclosed in the present as matters of public concern. In attending to these processes, this paper focuses on how the problem of inflation, and efforts to fight it, are linked closely with the logics and rhetoric of warfare. First, it outlines how interest in these processes emerged, at least in part, through attempts during the Second World War to render the futures of inflation actionable via public information campaigns. Second, it highlights the role of presidential speeches and addresses in 'the war on inflation' in the US during the 1970s and early 1980s. Third, and finally, the paper considers the importance of the promissory logics of inflation targeting in contemporary liberal democracies, in which inflation figures as a disruptive and generalised threat lurking in economic activity. In each case, efforts to fight inflation are based upon the premise that techniques of disclosure are a necessary element of generating the very futures they seek to make public. To govern inflation is therefore as much about governing orientations towards futures as it is about acting upon a well-defined epistemic object. In concluding, the paper speculates upon the wider implications of this claim for understanding how economic life is governed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in economic geography suggests the emergence of a distinctive relational and practice-centred set of perspectives on knowledge, based around concepts including communities of practice and relational proximity. This paper will argue that, despite the significant advances in understanding this work contributes, it does not yet provide a complete account of knowing-in- practice, and proposes a stronger focus on work activity as a first step in addressing this gap. The first half critically reviews this economic geography literature, focusing on how it articulates a view of practice in relation to knowledge, organisation, and space. The second half develops an alternative conceptualisation of knowing as work practice, particularly drawing on cultural - historical activity theory. This is organised around the dual spatially inflected concepts of situated and distributed knowledge. The paper concludes by arguing that, far from being mutually exclusive, the situated and distributed parts of knowing coexist in a dialectical relationship, and their interaction in work practice leads to the production of spaces of collective knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals working in graduate labour markets are increasingly expected to enhance their employability and career progression by undertaking lifelong education and learning within the workplace. Research has examined how graduates navigate this dynamic educational landscape, but the changing nature of educational providers has been comparatively neglected. In response, in this paper we examine the growth of for-profit business education service firms that have grown to meet the increased demand for lifelong learning and education by focusing on the financial business education sector in London. We develop cultural economy approaches to market making in order to understand how these educational service firms have developed by 'stabilizing' new educational services and products that compete with, and seek to 'destabilise', more established forms of business education, particularly MBA degrees. In so doing, we position educational service firms as an important, yet hitherto neglected set of business services within economic geography. Moreover, by focusing on a relatively mature for-profit educational sector, the research presented in the paper has important implications for the development of educational landscapes beyond the case of financial business education as they become increasingly beholden to the activities of for-profit education service firms and wider discourses of markets in educational services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an argument and empirical case study to draw out additional nuance in the social construction of institutions. Adapting the conceptual work of political scientists Mark Bevir and Roderick Rhodes to recent accounts in economic geography of institutional change we present an 'interpretative analysis' of recent policy changes in the regulation of land use in competitive global regions in London and the South East, UK. The paper examines the appeal to tradition, the construction of policy dilemmas, and the affect these have on what we think of as neoliberal policy reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree of localization of manufacturing, defined as the excess geographic concentration remaining after correcting for both sectoral concentration and the agglomeration of overall economic activity, has recently, gained new techniques of measurement in the form of indexes and numerical methods. These techniques are illustrated, compared, and theoretically discussed to show that they are consistent advancements, but none is yet able to satisfy all desirable properties. The measurement of localization would be more interesting if it could be related to economic processes and not limited to simple observational aspects. In achieving this, there are a number of complications, which are reviewed in the paper. Among these, the choice of the right sectoral scale at which these measures have to be applied is normally given too little importance. The second part of this paper advocates that this is a complex issue, since no digit level is appropriate for all industries. Moreover, different aggregations of narrowly defined subsectors may be more suitable than the standard industrial classifications. This is supported by an exploratory analysis, in two British sectors, based on the investigation of possible localization reasons identified in recent taxonomies. As the many localization measurement techniques have become available, it is recommended that they be applied to sector studies, and not confined to countrywide extensive explorations of all sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate in the ‘new’ economic geography over the dialectic between the cultural and the economic, and in which the study of the geography of consumption is a prime example. The consumer behavior of culturally distinct immigrants is an intriguing and complex economic and cultural inquiry. In this paper we explore the grocery-shopping behavior of suburban middle-class Chinese immigrants in Toronto, where the group's ethnic economy has become full-fledged. Using a mixed approach combining focus groups and logistic modeling, we examine the preferences of Chinese immigrants between the fast-growing Chinese supermarkets and competing mainstream supermarket chains. Attention is focused upon the interplay of ethnic identity and accessibility in determining store patronage. The findings suggest a stronger effect of ethnic affinity on immigrants' choice of shopping venue than that of economic rationality. Grocery shopping, a most mundane and taken-for-granted activity, is practiced with sociocultural meanings by immigrants, and the social use of ethnic shopping spaces indicates that immigrants are not only consumers in ethnic shopping places but coactors in producing the unique ethnic retail environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within economic geography, the internationalisation of retailing is a much understudied element of contemporary globalisation processes. In this paper the author seeks to develop the research agenda in this area from an economic - geographical perspective that is sensitive to spatial and temporal fluctuations in corporate strategies and investment patterns, the importance of political economic context(s), and the variety of potential developmental outcomes. The paper is structured into two main parts. First, the author offers a review of current levels of retail internationalisation in static and dynamic terms, illustrating that this is a phenomenon that demands more academic attention. The second reveals several limitations in the prevailing management/business approach to the topic, and maps out an explicitly geographical research agenda on the internationalisation of retailing. Six key areas in which research can usefully proceed are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address two issues of general relevance to contemporary debates in economic geography: first, the organisational and spatial implications of new information technologies for the economic landscape; and, second, the enduring role of place to digital capitalism. Specifically, I examine the organisational evolution of mnltichannel retailing in Toronto from a geographical perspective. Bricks-and-mortar retailers are increasingly pursuing a multichannel strategy by operating an lnternet-based web store alongside the existing network of physical retail outlets. I therefore evaluate the organisational implications of the adoption of business-to-consumer ecommerce (e-tailing) technology for six Canadian bricks-and-mortar retailers based in Toronto and assess how the associated changes in business structure have been inscribed upon the urban landscape. The argument is developed in three sections. First, I discuss how the formula for competitive advantage in the new (r)etail markets of the developed world has shifted from a pure play to a multichannel organisational paradigm. Second, I provide a background to the development of Canadian e-commerce and an overview of the empirical methodologies employed during the research. Third, the focus of the paper moves 'behind the web store' to spatialise the physical places that constitute the fulfilment infrastructure of e-tailing as sequentially linked stages in Internet commodity chains. I evaluate the impact of the Internet commodity chain upon the geographical organisation of each retailer, and, in particular, consider whether the unique logistical requirements of e-tailing have stimulated spatial processes of disintermediation and reintermediation. It is argued that, when read through the lens of Toronto, e-tailing has incurred limited organisational disruption and is characterised by a distinctive geography of integration between online and offline retailing services within the urban space of the city. I... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the geographical implications of having different types of knowledge bases--synthetic and symbolic--involved in one single but complex innovation process: car design. To do so, we investigated three contrasting car design strategies (Audi, Renault, and SAIC-GM) with the aim of exploring empirical regularities and the reasons underlying the links between knowledge bases, knowledge sourcing mechanisms, and resulting spatial configurations. Evidence suggests that when the synthetic knowledge base is dominant, formal collaboration and mobility are prime knowledge sourcing mechanisms. Moreover, knowledge creation and exchange is likely to occur between actors permanently located within the same region or through the temporary colocation of globally spread innovation partners. On the other hand, when symbolic knowledge is dominant, mobility, monitoring, and buzz turn to be the most relevant sourcing mechanisms, and knowledge creation and exchange are likely to occur within a more strictly local dimension (eg, in cities), through temporary colocation configurations (eg, presence in fairs and via temporary staff exchange), and by global scanning of competitors and trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual and methodological differences notwithstanding, both the 'new' economic geography and evolutionary economic geography insist that both history and geography matter when accounting for the changing spatial distribution of economic activities. To date, discourse has been conducted largely at a theoretical level, with few attempts to evaluate the empirical validity of either of these competing claims about the dynamics of the capitalist space economy. In this paper we contribute to this evolving discourse by utilizing a dynamic econometric perspective to empirically test the key notions of path dependence, place dependence, and equilibrium dependence in the context of a 'peripheral' resource dependent and export-oriented economy: Western Australia, 1984-2011. We find evidence of 'weak' path dependence in the evolution of local unemployment rates, with a small number of local labor markets exhibiting 'strong' equilibrium dependence. Furthermore, we find evidence of 'place' dependence, particularly between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan labor markets, suggesting the existence of a 'patchwork economy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing structure of international trade offers new opportunities for Africa, and some believe that new information communication technologies (ICTs)-- especially mobile phones, the Internet, and computers--can accelerate and deepen the region's integration into the world economy. This paper evaluates such claims through an in-depth empirical analysis of ICT use and its contribution to small, medium, and microscale enterprises (SMMEs) and industrial development in Tanzania's wood products and furniture sector. Drawing on concepts from time geography and sociotechnical transition theory, the analysis determines whether, how, and why (not) ICTs are enabling SMMEs to overcome constraints on their activities and whether the industrial regime governing and guiding the activities of firms is being transformed through ICT-driven changes in communication and information management practices. The findings detail the ways in which ICTs are (not) becoming integrated into the everyday industrial practices, highlight the implications of this integration for the industry's development, and demonstrate how research into ICT for development can benefit from a deeper and more critical understanding of the contexts in which technological diffusion occurs--conceptualized here as activity constraints and sociotechnical regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides an introduction to a theme issue devoted to the influence--and the potential--of the work of Karl Polanyi in the field of economic geography. Polanyi has been an inspirational figure in the heterodox field of 'socioeconomics', where the inseparability of the economic and the social is taken to be axiomatic. He has also made recurrent appearances in economic geography since the early 1990s, as a progenitor of the 'networks and embeddedness' approach and in his role as a prescient critic of market fundamentalism. But the potential of Polanyian approaches in economic geography has only been fitfully explored. In this context, the contributions to this theme issue make the case for a more sustained--but also open, critical, and creative--engagement with Polanyi's legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Polanyi has been an influential but also somewhat elusive figure in economic geography. Best known for his evocative notion of social embeddedness, it is perhaps fitting that Polanyi's presence has been more metaphorical than substantive. The paper asks what a more engaged Polanyian economic geography might look like. Focusing on methodological affinities, a response is developed in terms of a commitment to the substantivist (as opposed to formal) analysis of actually existing economic formations, together with a more purposive embrace of institutionalism, holism, and comparativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists often use the notion of 'transition' to denote diverse trajectories of change in different types of bodies: from individuals, to communities, to nation-states. Yet little work has theorised how transition might occur across, between, or beyond these bodies. The aim of this paper is to sketch out a multiple, synthetic, and generative (but by no means universal) theory of transition. Primarily drawing on the British context, we explore and exemplify two contentions. Firstly, that the notion of transition is increasingly being deployed to frame and combine discourses in terms of community development, responses to environmental change, and the individual lifecourse. Specifically framed as 'transition', such discourses are gaining increasing purchase in imagining futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures. Our second contention is that these discourses and policies must try to 'hold the future together' in one or more senses. They must wrestle with a tension between imminent threats (climate change, economic nonproductivity) which weigh heavily on the present and its possible futures, and the precarious act of redirecting those futures in ways that might better hold together diverse social groups, communities, and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial competition between firms is standard fare for traditional location theory and contemporary geographical economics. In this paper we examine the implications of modeling spatial competition using an approach grounded in geographical political economy, using mathematics as the language of theory. We make no presumptions about the existence of, or agents' prior knowledge about, equilibrium; utilizing methodologies from nonlinear dynamics appropriate to this situation. For competition between equally spaced retailers along an unbounded linear market, selling a homogeneous commodity to uniformly dispersed consumers we show that Nash equilibrium, which rationalizes the existence and persistence of spatial price equilibria, need not hold. Depending on behavioral parameters, out-of-equilibrium dynamics may not converge toward equilibrium, displaying instead limit-cycle or aperiodic behavior. Further, even for cases that do converge, it can be rational for firms in equilibrium to set prices which depart from it, thereby increasing their profits. The presumptions of geographical economics concerning equilibrium are not adequate to make sense of capitalist spatial price competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to technologies, firms, regional outputs, interregional accessibility, and trade when they are understood as coevolving? This paper offers a relational mathematical approach to this question, one whose embrace of disequilibrium, context, history, uncertainty, both monetary and material perspectives on economic activity, and complexity resonates productively with many qual-itative theoretical approaches. I present a multiregion, multisector, multifirm model of a society shaped by the pursuit of profit and explore some of its theoretical implications through the narration of simulations, including points of contrast with the approaches and implications of geographical economics. Under different conditions, various economic geographies emerge, including inter-regional divergence and convergence, specialisation and diversification, as well as the possibility of transitions between these dynamical paths. The relational quantitative method advanced here suggests directions for future research into the theoretical landscapes of economic geographies emerging beyond equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changing role and place of handicrafts in contemporary rural development processes. Building on fieldwork conducted in four settlements in northern Thailand and Vietnam, we discuss how a traditional sector is being reshaped under the forces of globalisa-tion and what this means for the character of rural livelihoods. This empirical analysis permits us to reflect on wider areas of debate within development and economic geography. By examining the spatialities of production, we explore how the 'place' of handicrafts in the settlements is being reshaped. We show how, although handicraft production retains an image of being part of a traditional sector built around local skills and inputs, in reality the activities have become deterritorialised and are increasingly spatially dispersed. Nonetheless, handicraft production remains economically and socially embedded and is helping to sustain village economies both in situ and in distant locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By way of an extended introduction to a theme issue on the space-times of decision making, this paper pursues two objectives. We first review some of the ways in which geographers—and especially economic geographers—have examined decision making over the past decades, showing that previous engagements with the decision are informed primarily by thinking from economics, psychology, and certain strands of sociology. Drawing on a wider range of intellectual resources, we then outline eight propositions that might guide future research by geographers and others into the space-times of decision making. These propositions help us to move beyond the idea that the decision is a singular moment abstracted from the context within which it takes place and undertaken by a discrete actor or set of actors. Instead the decision is understood as a differentiated, affectively registered, transformative, and ongoing actualisation of potential against a horizon of undecidability in which past, present, and future fold together in complex ways. A number of research questions follow from the outlined propositions: these pertain to the sites and techniques of decision making, its relationships to the governing of life, and our own decision-making practices as academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the materialization of geographical knowledges in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of urban space where the latter is based on processes of compulsory land purchase. The specific context for the study is two recently planned commercial redevelopments for the south London borough of Croydon in the United Kingdom, and the arguments mustered in support of these proposals. The author identifies and discusses three principal sets of geographical knowledges, which he examines under the headings symbolic, biopolitical, and scalar. In each case, he shows that the knowledges have strong modernist overtones. The paper seeks both to understand and contextualize these historical connections, and to consider the contemporary political work performed by the knowledges in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great majority of theoretical and empirical writing on economic globalization continues to focus on urban and semiurban regions, while largely ignoring the vast rural and peripheral spaces of the world. This paper uses research with small and medium-sized enterprises in remote regions of British Columbia, Canada, to develop a way of understanding the unique practices involved in `performing' global economic action from the rural periphery. Specifically, a framework based on insights from three theoretical approaches is advanced-relational network theory, an actor-network approach to distance, and complexity theory in economics-that, in combination, allow the capture of what is unique about efforts to `go global' from marginal geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]