Structural and locational influences affecting export performance in South Island export manufacturing firms : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography at Massey University

Industrialisation may be defined as 'the growth in the proportion of the workforce employed in factories or manufacturing' (Blyth , 1974, 2), Generally there is no single accepted theory of industrialisation, instead there is a wide spectrum of theories and models concerning industrialisation and its relationship to economic development at both the national and subnational scale. Industrialisation is assumed by most as the key to economic progress. Maizels (1970) argues that industrialisation raises the physical output per head in the agricultural and then subsequently in the manufacturing sector. Historically, this sets in motion the process of urbanisation and over time the urban population becomes employed in manufacturing. The manufacturing sector then expands and exports follow as a logical consequence

Battle of the Blockbusters: Joss Whedon as Public Pedagogue

This article discusses the concept of public pedagogy and the reasons for considering it relevant to the work of the writer/ director/ producer Joss Whedon, creator of numberous TV programmes, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, and Films Serenity, Marvel's The Avengers and The Age of Ultron. It analyzes Marvel’s The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) and Christopher Nolan’s (2012b) The Dark Knight Rises as competing public pedagogies.It suggests that popular films can be seen as important educational projects; filmmakers have tremendous resources at their disposal and their creations have a global reach that cannot be matched by individual teachers or national education systems. Whedon can be seen as a radical educator; he enables his audiences to experience ways of looking at the world that challenge aspects of neo-liberal hegemony, and also encourages them to become critical thinkers who have to reflect on their own feelings and perspectives and resist simplistic perspectives on morality and the difficult political choices facing global society

Development, underdevelopment, and the state in Ghana

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 5

Cultural economy and the creative field of the city

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labor market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The paper ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.cultural economy; creative field; creativity; creative city; urban economy; urban growth

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES: BEHIND THE SCENES INEQUALITIES

Film has been a major influence since its creation in the early 20th century. Women have always been involved in the creation of film as a cultural product. However, they have rarely been given positions of power in major film productions. Using qualitative approaches, I examine the different ways in which men and women directors approach creating film. I examine 20 films, half were directed by men and half by women. I selected the twenty films out of two movie genres: Action and Romantic Comedy. These genres were chosen because of their very gendered marketing. My focus was on the different ways in which gender was shown on screen and the differences in approach by men and women directors. The research showed differences in approach of gender but also different approaches in race and sexuality. Future studies should include more analysis on differences by race and sexuality

Wealth and Democracy

The renewed debate over inequality has highlighted a set of deficits in much of the last fifty-plus years of thinking on the topic. The late twentieth-century tradition of thinking about distributive justice largely assumed (1) that market dynamics would produce stable and tolerable levels of inequality; and (2) that a relatively powerful, competent, and legitimate state could effectively redistribute to mitigate what inequality did arise. What was largely overlooked in this thought and has since risen to central attention is the prospect that (1) accelerating levels of market-produced inequality will (2) undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the state and disable the political community from effectively pursuing distributive justice. This paper explains how the earlier assumptions arose, defined the boundaries of distributive justice for decades, and were undermined by developments from both the political left and the political right. At present, the dynamics of inequality appear to be self-perpetuating and self-accelerating, and much of earlier thinking on the topic has been rendered irrelevant by the erosion of its mistaken premises. Only a democratic effort to reconstitute a competent and legitimate state has any prospect of making inequality a tractable problem subject to effective intervention