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1.
《Geoforum》2015
An enduring focus of scholarly work on global production networks (GPNs) is the process of insertion into production networks and the capacity of places to shape their manner of inclusion. Sometimes overlooked are ways in which these insertions are based on an evolving set of exclusions. A disarticulations perspective trains our attention on the mutual interplay between moments of inclusion and exclusion that produce uneven geographies and histories of development, foregrounding place-specific factors and offering a framework for understanding local experimentation. Firms continue to restructure under relentless pressure to improve performance and the concomitant need to experiment, causing firm strategy to shape-shift and re-making relations of inclusion and exclusion. In the distribution function of global supply chains, the prevailing value-creation strategy is downward pressure on the cost of labor, but this perhaps suggests a false sense of stability. Using data gathered in the distribution hub just outside of Chicago, I examine the role of labor market intermediaries in re-negotiating the boundaries of inclusion. This article explores processes of linking and delinking subsets of workers and the differential implications for worker segments and their attachment to the supply chain. Inscribed in the absorption of places and workers into GPNs are ongoing processes of disarticulation, evident in this case through the labor market strategies pursued by local firms and temporary staffing agencies. These processes lay bare the mechanisms that reproduce capital-labor relationships in global supply chains. 相似文献
2.
R. M. Auty 《Geoforum》1981,12(4):349-357
The imlications of corporate product strategy and spatial structure for nationalisation by developing countries have been neglected. Corporate spatial diversification to reduce the importance of the target field unit in the corporate system is an important pre-requisite of frictionless divestment. But Guyanese nationalisation suggests that even after spatial diversification a vertically integrated, dominant product strategy confers less divestment capacity than a diversified, multi-product strategy. The product strategy classification used here may provide the necessary framework within which to explain the locational behaviour of multinational corporations. 相似文献
3.
Melissa W. Wright 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):291-301
This article investigates how a group of Hong-Kong Chinese managers of the offshore facilities of a US-based corporation extend their firm’s base in southern China while simultaneously establishing themselves as a new kind of “Chinese” manager. These new managers set out to accomplish what their colleagues in other corporate sites have not been able to do: control the turnover rate of a female labor force, described as sexually tumultuous and hormonally problematic. To control the labor turnover rate, these managers create a strategy for keeping workers “just long enough” before they lose their dexterity and attentiveness as a result of repetitive work. Their strategy relies on a discourse of in loco parentis to justify invasive policies for monitoring workers’ bodily functions and basic mobility inside and outside of the factory. To make this argument, the article combines a Marxian critique of value with post-structuralist theories of discursive subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate how the negotiation of social identity within the capitalist firm proceeds through the representation of binary cultural and sex differences that reinforce the dichotomies of laborer and manager. However, these binaries unfold in unpredictable and uneven ways that can prove problematic for the capitalist endeavor. The material for this article comes from an ethnographic study of this company’s operations in southern China and in northern Mexico. 相似文献
4.
Noah Quastel 《Geoforum》2011,42(4):451-461
While geographers have increasingly focused on how global commodity and production networks create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ there has been little empirical work considering how responsibility is worked into management systems and social activism in such networks. Drawing on literature from global production networks, geographies of responsibility and other literatures, this paper explores the dynamic and contested ways in which concepts of responsibility can play a role in network regulation. Both foreign direct investment and commodity networks (here referred to as ‘global production and investment networks’) are subject to complex negotiations and compromises involving corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives as well as shareholder activist, human rights, labor, and environmental activism. This is illustrated by reference to conflicts in Canada over Alcan, Inc.’s investments from 1993 to 2007 in the Utkal Alumina Project in Orissa, India. The project involved significant socio-environmental conflict. In Canada, Alcan’s investment was met by civil society campaigns that tested the company’s commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The case study suggests revising theories of geographies of responsibility. While foreign direct investment can create new relationships between distant others, these are fluid and contingent and not necessarily desirable. Rather than see networks as a source of responsibility we should work to ensure that the relationships that networks foster be structured to ensure our deeper values are respected. 相似文献
5.
《Geoforum》2015
Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO2) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well. 相似文献
6.
This essay provides analyses of labor strikes at two early sites (first quarter of the 20th century) of the global production line – Singer Manufacturing Company’s factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia – and the labor management strategies that led to and resulted from these particular enactments of power. I focus on the degree to which Singer and its employees were embedded in local, regional and national contexts, and how and why workers’ agency mattered to the course of early globalization. I also suggest that such analyses provide significant understanding of how and why early global production was both different from and similar to contemporary globalization. By so doing, this analysis contributes to theoretical discussions concerning degrees of territorial embeddedness of transnational corporations, particularly in regard to changes over time as well as geographic scale, and adds historical nuance to theoretical questions concerning labor geographies under conditions of globalization. 相似文献
7.
A. Wendy Russell 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):213-222
In this paper, I argue that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have inherent potential to contribute to socially and environmentally sustainable agriculture by virtue of their ‘biological embeddedness’. Their actual ‘performance’ and how this contributes to sustainability depends on the ‘mutual shaping’ of technology and context. While much attention has been given to the design context of GMOs, this paper considers the influence of the application context and of users. A case study investigating the use of insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant GM cotton in the cotton-growing region of New South Wales in Australia is presented. The study was based on focus groups with farmers and other stakeholders in a cotton-growing community. It demonstrated a range of direct and indirect effects of GM cotton use, both positive and negative for sustainability, and the ways in which these effects were influenced by the local social context. The influences of the biotechnology industry context, in limiting the contributions that gene technologies can make to sustainability, were also considered, and remedies suggested. I argue that the polarity of the GM debate is hindering progress on these issues, and that a more balanced approach to our analysis of GMOs is necessary in order to fully understand, and to influence, their role in the future of rural spaces. 相似文献
8.
The inclusion of new groups of workers has been an important component of union renewal efforts. Several unions in Canada have begun to dedicate significant resources to better organize and represent Aboriginal workers. Drawing on interviews with union activists, organizers and representatives from two national public sector unions in Canada, we present an overview of union strategies to engage with Aboriginal peoples. Results suggest that understanding the distinct territorial context of Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions has been necessary to the success of these union strategies. This approach begins by drawing connections between Aboriginal peoples’ present-day relationships to work and their prior occupancy of, and dispossession from, lands and resources. Because of the geographical specificity of how the colonial experience affected Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions, unions have had to adopt non-normative approaches to their engagements with Aboriginal peoples. In workplaces where settlers were dominant, addressing racism in the workplace and gaining support for initiatives to hire and train Aboriginal workers were important. Alternatively, in Aboriginal workplaces, organizing was a priority. Here questions of union legitimacy have taken precedence and the focus of unions has been on partnership building. Most importantly, however, engagement with Aboriginal peoples has brought attention to the colonial practices within unions and helped to foster growing Aboriginal voice within the labour movement. 相似文献
9.
《Geoforum》2014
Genetic commodification relies on methods that treat genes as information. By representing genes as information, scientists produce standardized and stable objects that are easily tradable. In this paper, I argue that a Midwestern plant conservation science institution (MPCSI) challenges genetic commodification through distinct knowledge-making and social practices. In particular, scientists at this institution treat genes not as information, but as contextual and contingent entities. By employing genetic technologies that deemphasize the code metaphor of genes, these scientists make genes unavailable to trade as information.I analyze the socionatural implications of this institution’s use of genetic technology in native ecosystem restoration. Drawing from interviews and participant observation, I focus on specific techniques used by the MPCSI’s scientists to view genes as embodied relational entities, rather than abstract information. I illustrate how these technologies allow the MPCSI to challenge the epistemologies and methodologies that are crucial to producing genetic commodities.Additionally, I illustrate how the MPCSI serves as a model for plant science institutions to reconceptualize their use of banked plant genetic resources. This model complicates the commodity speculation paradigm common to bioprospectors. At the same time, this genetic restoration approach relies on and produces different engagements with markets. I detail the MPCSI’s emerging relationship with commercial seed nurseries to illustrate how decommodification is integral to commodification. Finally, I argue that although the MPCSI’s genetic restoration strategy necessitates limited market engagements, their scientific practices and institutional relationships produce drastically different socioecological outcomes compared to institutions that treat genes as information. 相似文献
10.
《Geoforum》2017
Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it. 相似文献
11.
Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris 《GeoJournal》2018,83(1):61-72
The intricacies of one of the most relevant agribusiness frontiers in the world today—the north of the State of Mato Grosso, in the southern section of the Amazon, Brazil—are considered through a critical examination of place-making. Vast areas of Amazon rainforest and savannah vegetation were converted there, since the 1970s, into places of intensive soybean farming, basically to fulfil exogenous demands for land and agriculture production. The present assessment goes beyond the configuration of new places at the agricultural frontier, and starts with a qualitative intellectual jump: from place-making on the frontier to place-making as an ontological frontier in itself. It means that, instead of merely studying the frontier as a constellation of interconnected places, we examine the politicised genesis of the emerging places and their trajectory under fierce socio-ecological disputes. The consideration of almost five decades of intense historic-geographical change reveals an intriguing dialectics of displacement (of previous socio-ecological systems, particularly affecting squatters and indigenous groups, in order to create opportunities for migrants and companies), replacement (of the majority of disadvantaged farmers and poor migrants, leading to land concentration, widespread financialisation and the decisive influence of transnational corporations) and misplacement (which is the synthesis of displacement and replacement, demonstrated by mounting risks and a pervasive sentiment of maelstrom). Overall, there was nothing inevitable in the process of rural and regional development, but the problems, conflicts and injustices that characterise its turbulent geographical trajectory were all more or less visible from the outset. 相似文献
12.
R.M. Auty 《Geoforum》1983,14(1):1-13
During the post-war period multinational resource corporations in the mature stage of their product life-cycle pursued a dominant product strategy, retaining vertical integration from the pioneer stage and adding geographical diversification to reduce risk and secure economies of scale. Heightened uncertainty since the mid-seventies has removed the key assumption of this product strategy, namely that the need for product diversification would be signalled in ample time. The oil majors' dilemma between investment in new growth products or rationalisation of their existing oil-based chains underlines the present high risk of the dominant product strategy for multinational resource corporations. 相似文献
13.
Privatizing farm worker justice: Regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
This paper assesses the possibilities and limits of efforts to incorporate social accountability into California agricultural production through voluntary certification and labeling, in the context neoliberal governance. We argue that, in its contradictory role as market mechanism, regulatory form, and social cause, certification both resists neoliberalization of the agro-food system and reinscribes neoliberal thinking. Unlike more traditional forms of social justice organizing, which have historically sought to alter power relations between labor, capital, and the state, the very notion that production conditions can be regulated through voluntary, third-party monitoring and labeling embraces several key neoliberal principles: the primacy of the market as a mechanism for addressing environmental and social ills, the privatization of regulatory functions previously reserved for the public sphere, and the assertion of the individual rights and responsibilities of citizen–consumers. Interviews with certification actors lead us to conclude that the strategic embrace of certification is driven by contradictory motivations within the movement for social accountability in agriculture, which can only be understood in relation to the confluence of a broader neoliberal political–economic order with California’s particular arrangements of farm labor politics and agro-food activism. Specifically, agro-food consolidation, rollback of protective labor regulation, the evisceration of the farm worker movement, and the conservative agrarianism of the sustainable agriculture movement intersect to circumscribe the realm of possibility and create conditions that undermine farm worker representation in the governance of agricultural labor practices. 相似文献
14.
Günter Krumme 《GeoJournal》1984,9(2):111-119
The paper attempts to bridge some of the gaps between (macro) regional-economic and (micro) corporate-geographic perspectives and research approaches. Local stakeholders of large manufacturing activities are tied to the corporate environment through complex linkages. Large corporations tends to perform various gate-keeping roles for the local community. External turbulence (e.g. in export markets) may be mitigated or accentuated by the decisions, strategies and spatial structures of the gate-keeping corporation. Examples are drawn from the aircraft industry and its particularly turbulent environments and significant local employment impacts. 相似文献
15.
《Geoforum》2015
This article introduces the conceptual notion of Emigrant Infrastructure to further debates on diaspora strategies, extraterritorial belonging, and citizenship. Diasporic strategies are altering the possibilities for transnational citizenship and redefining belonging through the introduction of emigrant documentary schemes aimed at formalizing relationships with the diasporic subject. Using India as a case study, this article examines the historical development of the Overseas Citizen of India and Overseas Indian Card, state technologies that transformed emigrants from unwanted others into desired diasporic subjects. Outlining historical spatio-temporal junctures of the legal, policy, and bureaucratic engagements between the Government of India and emigrants reveals a deep Emigrant Infrastructure erected through three phases: active, reactive and hyperactive (linked to the colonial, post-colonial, and post-liberal Indian state). Tracing emigrant—government engagements, the article reveals how India actively constructed itself as a homeland with a diaspora. Understanding the formalization of a diasporic subject de-naturalizes the spatial assumptions linking nation, state, territory, citizenship, and people. Emigrant Infrastructure understood through diasporic subjectivity and identification cards reveals the spatiality of diaspora strategies and a changing relationship between the reterritorializing nation and the deterritorializing state. 相似文献
16.
《Geoforum》2015
This paper examines the effect of cluster organisations on the international competitive advantages of clusters in the European life sciences industry. Data on coordinated cluster organisations are used to assess whether cluster development policies enhance the attractiveness of clusters to multinational corporations (MNCs). We estimate mixed logit models using a sample of 481 greenfield investments by life sciences MNCs in West-European regions during the period 2010–2013. Contrary to the beliefs of policymakers, our results indicate that both the presence of cluster organisations and higher-order activities of cluster organisations have only a small effect in attracting greenfield investments. In addition, cluster organisations help attract economic activities with less specific location requirements, such as production plants and sales and marketing offices. This finding provides valuable insights for policymakers, as investing public funds in cluster organisations is not found to attract high value-added business activities, such as those that occur in headquarters and R&D facilities, which are often the target of such investments. 相似文献
17.
This paper introduces the special issue ‘organisational geographies of power’ by examining the theoretical and empirical context for debates. It does this, firstly, with reference to existing theoretical work on what power is and does as well as work on the construction of power relations. Building on this, the paper then, secondly, examines the way relational and production network approaches have incorporated power into work on transnational corporations before, thirdly, considering how work on neoliberalism has studied the construction of spatial power relations. In doing this the paper highlights four important questions for future research relating to the practices and spatiality of power, the exercising of power and the situated effects of power relations. 相似文献
18.
《Geoforum》2018
We address the territorial embeddedness of resource management: the way in which resource management is shaped by the territorial context in which it occurs, as well as the way in which resource management contributes to shape new territories. We demonstrate that Industrial Ecology (IE), as a specific resource management approach, can be used to gain new perspectives on territorial patterns emerging with resource optimization. First, we lay down a theoretical framework that should underlie the use of territory as a concept, building bridges between geography and IE. Then, drawing upon this theoretical framework, we develop a methodological structure that can lead to and manifest the process of territorial construction at work in IE. We test the knowledge production capacity of this theoretical and methodological approach to territory in IE by applying it to a specific case study in the Aix-Marseille Provence metropolitan area (France). This paper thus enhances knowledge about the territorialization process at work in IE, by identifying different IE territories within the same geographic area and positioning local stakeholders, understood as local inhabitants, with respect to territorial interfaces. Finally, we discuss how IE, as a specific resource management approach, questions the different aspects of the connection between people and geographical places in a natural management context. 相似文献
19.
《Geoforum》2017
This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues in discrete inter-disciplinary literatures to identify ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation, overlaying and co-existing with flexible production, and encompassing novel firm-level strategies, new forms of corporate networks, and a disturbing capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneurial but self-exploiting subjects. I explain the novelty of open innovation, its genealogy, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as for firms in a new topology of power relations. I cast the ensemble of strategies and tactics encompassed in open innovation as contingent, continually unfolding, and sometimes chaotic if not destructive for both firms and labor, in contrast to the celebratory tone in the business as well as geography and regional studies literatures regarding its benefits for competitiveness, innovativeness, value capture, and development. Open innovation – the externalization of innovation – entails long-run approaches to innovation and investment that are fraught with problems, prompting the development of short-term tactics to engage the challenges. One short-run strategy, crowdsourcing, bypasses the conventional web of inter-firm relations to connect digitally with individuals of the global crowd, enabling firms to reap the benefits of the crowd’s innovative talents, often without remuneration under circumstances that institutionalize informal work. These neoliberal subjects are best understood in terms of multiple subjectivities. I close by connecting the crowdsourcing of innovative with non-innovative work, both of which are parts of the emergent regime associated with new hiring and work practices that usher in new modes of exploitation. 相似文献
20.
新型城镇化建设鼓励农村剩余劳动力向城市转移,同时农村劳动力转移的持续发展又进一步加大了对新型城镇化建设的支持力度.由于劳动者的整体素质较低以及务工领域低端化等因素的存在,农村劳动力转移具有一定的脆弱性.甘肃省城镇化水平滞后、城乡差距较大等问题依然突出,农户作为农村地区最主要的经济活动主体与最基本的决策单位,劳动力转移的状况直接影响到其生计水平和区域生态安全.以甘肃省14个地州市为研究区,通过对可持续生计框架的应用,揭示劳动力转移的关键性因素,定量评估劳动力转移对农户生计资本的影响程度,总结出有利于提高甘肃省农户发展能力、改善农户生计水平的政策建议,从而为促进西部地区可持续发展、缓解贫困、实现精准扶贫提供参考依据. 相似文献