Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia

In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale perspective to the analysis of recent industrial relations legislation in Australia, I show that the nature and direction of rescaling is “fixed” by the powers of institutional actors and the scope of their jurisdictions. I then draw on the distinctively scaled relations of the Australian context to assess the extent to which Australia's national rescaling processes can be seen as representing a process of convergence toward universal “spaces of neoliberalism”

City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change

Shifting Spatialities of Power: The Case of Australasian Aviation

This paper explores how different modalities, spatialities and scales of power operate in a geopolitical context. By tracing the dynamic and shifting economic geographies of state and firm power in the events leading up to the collapse of a major Australian firm, Ansett Airlines, it reveals the difference that place and position make to the creation and use of power. The paper stresses agents’ relational positioning, their ‘places’ in multiple networks of association and the ways in which their past actions and visions of the future condition their strategic options. The paper contextualises the workings of power and explores how power relationships are re-configured in specific contested events. It concludes that power cannot be separated from the spatial and temporal dimensions of actual contexts, from actor’s positions in contexts, or from their strategic objective

Are Labour Markets Necessarily Local? Spatiality, Segmentation and Scale

This paper draws on recent debates about scale to approach the geography of labour markets from a dynamic perspective sensitive to the spatiality and scale of labour market restructuring. Its exploration of labour market reconfigurations after the collapse of a major firm (Ansett Airlines) raises questions about geography’s faith in the inherently ‘local’ constitution of labour markets. Through an examination of the job reallocation process after redundancy, the paper suggests that multiple labour markets use and articulate scale in different ways. It argues that labour market rescaling processes are enacted at the critical moment of recruitment, where social networks, personal aspirations and employer preferences combine to shape workers’ destinations

Conceptual globalism and globalisation : an initiation

Although the use of these two terms began in the latter half of the twentieth century, they have a longer lineage. Concept economic globalism of contemporary kind can be traced back to the liberal thinking of classical economists like Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer. Terms like globalize were first seen in Reiser and Davies (1944). Webster International Dictionary included them in 1961, while they appeared in Oxford Dictionary in 1986. The term globalization was coined in 1962. Most major languages were quick to develop equivalent taxonomy. In business and economics, marketing legend Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business School used it first in 1983 in an article entitled "The Globalization of Markets". His article is regarded as an enduring classic and its insightful language is still relevant today

Local-global geographies of tacit knowledge production in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firms

For economic geographers interest in the role of knowledge in economic activities and a ‘knowledge economy’ raises questions about how geography enables (and disables) learning and whether the production of tacit knowledge has exclusively local or multiple overlapping geographies. This thesis engages with this debate and considers its relevance to the geographies of tacit knowledge production (learning) in the employees of global advertising and law professional service firms operating in London and New York City. It begins by critically engaging with theories of knowledge, learning and their geographies to develop a spatially sensitive approach to examine learning. Such an analysis is then applied in order to understand the geographies of knowledge production in global advertising and law firms. Three themes are addressed. First, why is tacit knowledge important in the work of these firms? Second, what are the key practices involved in producing such knowledge? Third, what are the geographies of these practices and how important is the local scale (the communities within London and New York) and the global scale (the communities stretched between offices of the global firms studied) for knowledge production. Research findings from semistructured interviews highlight the multiple geographies of learning in the firms studied at both local and global scales. This is enabled by a number of ‘embedding’ forces that ‘smooth’ the learning process and that have multiple geographies themselves. It is therefore argued that a relational and topological analysis that traces the learning networks across space most usefully provides insights into the geographies of knowledge production. This reveals that the ‘networks and spaces of learning’ are fluid and transcend spatial scales when suitable constructed

African gateways : measuring airline connectivity change for Africa's global urban networks in the 2003-2009 period

This paper studies the globalization of major African cities through their changing insertion in global airline networks. As such, the paper adds to a growing body of literature that analyzes the role of infrastructure in the formation of world-city networks. We draw on a rich data source that provides longitudinal airline booking data, which can be directly linked up to the evolution of inter-urban networks at the African and global scale. Our results indicate that Johannesburg remains the major gateway to Africa, but other regional centers and in particular Cairo, Lagos, Casablanca and Nairobi are rapidly complementing Johannesburg in this role. The globalization of African cities is related to rapid network growth on the African continent, but is outrun by fast growth in terms of non-African connections. Among the latter, connections to Asia and the Middle East are rapidly gaining importance. In the end, the paper argues that SouthSouth connections are crucial for an understanding of the contemporary globalization of African cities

Geography and International Inequalities: the Impact of New Technologies

Some writers have predicted that new technologies mean the 'death of distance', allowing suitably skilled economies to converge with high income countries. This paper evaluates this claim. It argues that geography matters for international income inequalities, and that new technologies will change, but not abolish this dependence. Some activities may become more entrenched in high income countries than they are at present. Others - where information can be readily codified and digitized - will relocate, but typically only to a subset of lower income countries. These countries will benefit, but other countries will continue to experience the costs of remoteness.

New insights into the internationalization of producer services:Organizational strategies and spatial economies for global headhunting firms

This paper uses the exemplar of global headhunting firms to provide new insights into the intricacies of internationalization and related ‘spatial economies’ of producer services in the world economy. In particular, we unpack the complex relationships between the organisational rationale for, the selected mode of, and future benefits gained by internationalization, as headhunting firms seek and create new geographical markets. We achieve this through an analysis of headhunting firm-specific case study data that details the evolving way such firms organize their differential strategic growth (organic, merger and acquisition, and alliances/network) and forms (wholly-owned, networked or hybrid). We also highlight how, as elite labour market intermediaries, headhunters are important, yet understudied, actors within the (re)production of a ‘softer’, ‘knowledgeable’ capitalism. Our argument, exemplified through detailed mapping of the changing geographies of headhunting firms between 1992 and 2005, demonstrates the need for complex and blurred typologies of internationalization and similarly complex internationalization theory

Does economic geography matter for Pakistan? a spatial exploratory analysis of income and education inequalities

Generally, econometric studies on socio-economic inequalities consider regions as independent entities, ignoring the likely possibility of spatial interaction between them. This interaction may cause spatial dependency or clustering, which is referred to as spatial autocorrelation. This paper analyzes for the first time, the spatial clustering of income, income inequality, education, human development, and growth by employing spatial exploratory data analysis (ESDA) techniques to data on 98 Pakistani districts. By detecting outliers and clusters, ESDA allows policy makers to focus on the geography of socio-economic regional characteristics. Global and local measures of spatial autocorrelation have been computed using the Moran’s I and the Geary’s C index to obtain estimates of the spatial autocorrelation of spatial disparities across districts. The overall finding is that the distribution of district wise income inequality, income, education attainment, growth, and development levels, exhibits a significant tendency for socio-economic inequalities and human development levels to cluster in Pakistan (i.e. the presence of spatial autocorrelation is confirmed).Spatial effects; spatial exploratory analysis; spatial disparities; income inequality; education inequality; spatial autocorrelation