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ParentCompany's decision to closeR&DCoin North East England caused the loss of highly skilled scientific and technical jobs.R&DCowas a“white-collar” R&D operation and supplier of services toParentCompany's lead factories in the East Midlands and South West regions. The economic and social costs of closure were acute for the North East with its relatively weak growth, high unemployment and limited R&D activity. This paper argues that a clearer understanding and progressive response to such closures may benefit from a conceptualisation founded upon spatialised social relations and characterised by a social process of production that unfolds over time, across space and in place. Periodised in episodic socio-spatial“moments”, a historically evolving social process of closure reveals differential potential—contingent upon specific conjunctures of structural forces, social agency and the particularities of places—to enable and/or inhibit intervention through public policy and institutional action and political mobilisation and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the neglected issue in the 'globalisation' debate concerning the contraction and withdrawal of capital from the territories. The analysis is built upon consideration of the institutional architecture, state inter-relations and territoriality and nationality of capital. The paper concludes that historical evolution and contingency are critical to left analysis of the 'globalisation' of capital and may help to resist and contest regressive changes and lay the foundations of collaboration and alliance building for more progressive economic and social strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, economic geographers have turned their attention to the growing geographical reach and complexity of economic networks to focus on the increasing integration of economies, the geographical organization of economic activity and the social, economic and political relationships within these networks. Within this work, particular attention has been paid to the corporation, allowing for corporate geographies to be rethought using new approaches and new methodologies. Building on these approaches, we seek to develop a holistic economic geography which embeds the globalizing corporation within a broad array of economic, social, political and cultural settings shaped by multiple social agents. We do this in the con- text of the European steel industry. We argue that refocusing attention on the steel industry is important for two reasons. First, the industry itself has radically changed in the last decade. Persistent global overcapacity and cycles of profitability, ongoing consolidation and privatization, the emergence of new steel regions and of more 'globalized' steel producers have all altered the industry's anatomy. Second, the tools of economic geography have changed. New approaches enable us to look again at the steel industry and to rethink its corporate geographies. This article develops these arguments by using an innovative approach, integrating the narratives of two steel corporations and two European steel regions, and focusing on issues of corporate geography, financialization, government and governance, labour and community. In this way, we seek to continue the strong tradition within economic geography of conceptualizing the spatial contexts and consequences of economic change through accounts of the continuous remaking of steel geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]