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The paper notes a growing, diverse and yet somewhat partial and disparate interest among geographers in the illicit. Within this there has been little substantive interest in organized criminality despite it constituting a range of activities comparable in their significance to other aspects of the illicit that have attracted extensive attention from geographers. This paper argues that the development of a geographical perspective on organized crime is timely and seeks to map out connections with both the extant literatures of organized crime and those of human geography.

Despite playing central roles in state-building, economic development, social reproduction, and cultural politics, education has remained on the margins of critical geographical thought. Recent research, however, suggests that geographers are taking notice of the widespread and profound restructuring underway in advanced capitalist education sectors. This paper considers the possibilities for geographical research on (formal) education, and outlines one particular agenda for this emerging field. Rather than advocating a discrete topical specialty, it proposes developing a decentered and outward-looking literature — one in which education systems, institutions, and practices are positioned as useful sites for a variety of theory-building projects. The paper sketches several applications of this `joined-up' approach. `Thinking through' education — either as a constitutive moment or a critical case study of sociospatial transformation — may inform discussions of the geographies of neoliberalization, globalization, and knowledge economy formation.

Embeddedness remains a central concept in much economic geographical thought for understanding how social factors influence economic activity. Recent commentators have argued for a reconceptualization that entails a relational and processual redefinition of the concept. This paper argues, however, that there remain deep-rooted epistemological problems with embeddedness that are not overcome by this emerging reconceptualization. It argues that the conceptual lexicon of embeddedness conflates economic action and outcomes, insufficiently captures power and agency and produces a limited understanding of the spatialized development of economic activity. It further argues that the language of embeddedness conceals dimensions to transnational business activity that require increasing theoretical attention in order to explain economic success or failure in the context of contemporary globalization. In contrast to those seeking to reconceptualize embeddedness, the paper thus argues for a relational and associational approach centred on tracing the practices that produce economic outcomes in the contemporary global space economy. This alternative approach draws on recent contributions to actor-network theory as well as relational and topological theorizations of the nature of power and knowledge in relation to economic activity. The arguments are grounded with reference to a series of examples drawn from research into the nature of contemporary transnational firms.

This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to ‘ground’ the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps ‘ground’ the concept of transnationalism.

The aim of this paper is to explore a theoretical framework that can assist in under-standing the extent to which the increased integration of macro-regional economies (such as the European and North American) and the global economy is leading to divergence and/or convergence in the pattern of economic activity and the distribution of value-added and wealth. In particular, the paper focuses on the extent to which changing divisions of labour, the production, appropriation and allocation of value, and economic organization underpin these processes of convergence/divergence. We focus on developing an understanding of the changing divisions of labour across space in increasingly integrated macro-regional economies such as Europe and North America, and the (unequal) flows of value between places that underpin mosaics of territorial inequality. We argue that the production and flows of value associated with different forms of economic activities and commodity production and exchange in different localities provides a framework for understanding changing geographical divisions of labour. We also argue that a critical engagement with the range of work associated with analysing ‘commodity chains’ and ‘commodity networks’ provides a way into thinking about the (dis)organization of economic activity and value creation, appropriation and distribution. In particular, we argue that the focus on the commodity, while initially helpful, is misplaced because commodities embody and carry with them relations of value. Consequently, our attention should be focused on the organization of the production, appropriation and realization of value flows and the various forces that structure these processes, such as state governance, labour organization, corporate practices and so on, that are fundamental to understanding the (re)configuration of economic activity in macro-regional economies.

This paper argues that retail spaces, such as marketplaces, are increasingly becoming sites of urban contestation. The globalisation of retail, online shopping and the redevelopment of cities has pushed marketplaces to the margins, but they still serve millions of people, particularly the urban poor. Concurrently, marketplaces are branded as authentic consumption experiences for tourists and residents. Building on these contradictions, I propose a novel framework with three analytical lenses to reposition marketplaces as marginal city spaces that serve as productive sites for studying urban transformation processes across the Global North and South.

How can the modalities and whereabouts of power - and specifically the spatio-temporal contingencies and reach of power relations - be more effectively studied? This paper shows how issues of validity and reflexivity restrict existing empirical work’s ability to advance understandings of power, and demonstrates how such issues can be overcome through the refined use of methods and analytical techniques that tease out the double contingencies of the social relations that underlie power. Refinements are shown to be possible by learning, in particular, from approaches to analysing power elsewhere in the social sciences, and particularly from management studies and linguistics.

Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic ‘playing field’ in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America’s future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890—1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States’ expansion in the early twentieth century.

Among scholars of globalization and neoliberalism, there has been a marked turn away from the national as a relevant scale in today's world, with researchers arguing that the national is being `rescaled' to local, regional and global scales. This paper argues that we need to move beyond this rescaling argument to recognize that the national still is relevant in contemporary political economy. Seeing the national not as a discrete scale but as a dimension of political economic practice is an alternative analytical approach that treats the national as constitutively implicated in other scaled activities. Distinctions between one scale and another are not so clear. This approach enhances our understanding of contemporary patterns and processes because, instead of focusing on one set of scales or another, analysis can reveal relations among multiple scales. This approach also moves us beyond the historical periodization posited in the rescaling literature. Instead of providing descriptions of contemporary change in which the dominant national is giving way to a messier configuration of global and local scales, the idea of scales-as-dimensions offers a way of analysing scalar relations more generally. This can then be used in both contemporary and historical analysis. The rescaling argument treats the national largely as residual, which serves to draw our attention away from complex scalar practices without offering a truly different way of thinking about scalar relations.

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography—the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve `the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions—rather than scale per se—should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change.

Anthropologists and geographers are increasingly tuming to one another for tools to analyze the present global political-economic conjuncture. Yet to date there has been no adequate accounting of the comparative advantages each field brings to studies of globalization Anthropology with its emphasis on the role of culture in anchoring (or resisting) globalizing processes within particular societies and Geography with its more comparative emphasis on the politics of place and scale. This paper is intended to contribute to interdisciplinary exchange through such an accounting and argues for a constructive synthesis geared toward understand-ing how ‘local’ cultural systems articulate with political-economic currents operating at wider spatial scales.

A resurgence of interest in the region as a scale of economic organization has been apparent within economic geography over the past decade or so. In view of the apparent shift towards a ‘knowledge-driven economy’, the capacity of regions to support processes of learning and innovation has been identified as a key source of competitive advantage. This paper provides a critical appraisal of recent work on innovation, learning and regional development, situating this within its intellectual context. We argue that, while the focus on knowledge and learning is highly relevant, much of the literature fails to adequately ground its arguments in empirical enquiry and also tends to underemphasize the importance of wider extra-local networks and structures. In conclusion, we offer some directions for further research.