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The author proposes the use of layers and filters as metaphors for depicting and examining regional government strategy. Layers indicate spatial variation between new regulatory mechanisms and preexisting regional conditions, while filters indicate institutions that mediate impacts of non-local regulatory mechanisms.

The evolving geography of employment law in the privatized rail industry of the United Kingdom is examined. Results showed a major shift at how industrial relations are organized under privatization. The changes in wages and benefits, industrial disputes, membership in labor unions, and strike actions, are also investigated.

Economic geographers and related specialists have taken keen interest in studying regional innovations and learning. Evidence to prove that regional networks are important in providing support to innovations has also been discussed.

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]

The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in the role of labour in political and economic restructuring. Following a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when trade unions and employees were routinely portrayed as passive victims of corporate restructuring, the past ten years have seen a resurgence of work by geographers highlighting the continued agency of labour. Despite this 'new labour geography', however, there has been little empirical research examining the uneven development of employment relations at a broad industry level. We address this issue by examining the changing geography of employment regulation in the UK's privatised rail industry. A major shift in the scale at which industrial relations are organised has taken place under privatisation, away from national collective bargaining to a system of localised company bargaining. On the basis of secondary data gathered from industry sources, we provide an initial assessment of key outcomes of employment change in the rail industry. Our analysis indicates that considerable disparities in pay and conditions exist between different groups of workers, companies, and regions, although these are perhaps less extreme than suggested by the unions. In addition, the number of industrial disputes has escalated in the aftermath of privatisation. Moreover, instead of the set piece national strikes that took place in the nationalised industry, the majority of this strike action has been conducted against particular operators at the local and regional scales, reflecting the logic of company-level bargaining. At the same time, the membership of the three main unions has actually increased in recent years against a backdrop of long-term decline, suggesting that the decentralisation of collective bargaining presents unions with opportunities as well as challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]