The platform conjuncture

The paper engages the problematic of platform capitalism in the company of Fernand Braudel. Platform capitalism is accordingly located in the opaque zone of the so-called antimarket, “where the great predators roam,” with its characteristic conditions of monopolization, concentrated economic and political power, and cultures of systematic regulatory evasion. The Braudelian schema requires that platform capitalism is situated, both historically and geographically, in this case both as a distinctive conjunctural moment and as an epiphenomenon of variegated and globalizing processes of financialization and neoliberalization. The paper offers an antidote to the mainstream treatment of platforms, with its technological exuberance, its preoccupation with internally generated dynamics, and its exaggerated claims to novelty and indeed revolutionary significance. Thinking conjuncturally about platform capitalism qua Braudelian capitalism does not just counter these problems, it represents a constructive supplement to extant political-economy accounts. It accentuates and problematizes non-repeating historical continuities (against presumptions of a radical technological-organizational break). And it points to constitutive conditions of coexistence (against the imaginary of a separate, self-propelling, and distinct innovation economy). To pose the platform question along with Braudel is to begin with problematics of monopoly power and antimarket behavior, rather than with technological affordances, network capacities, or the market

Transatlantic city, part 1 : conjunctural urbanism

As the first installment of a two-part article exploring contemporary transformations in metropolitan governance in the wake of the entrepreneurial turns of the 1980s and subsequent waves of neoliberalisation and financialisation, a case is outlined here for a ‘conjunctural’ approach to urban analysis. This can be considered to be complementary to, but at the same time distinct from, some of the concurrent approaches to comparative urbanism, in that it explicitly problematises the relative positioning of cities in the context of uneven development and multiscalar relations, as well as the dialogic connections between case studies, midlevel concepts and revisable theory claims. Taking as its point of departure the current financial and political crisis in Atlantic City, the New Jersey casino capital, the article historicises the concept of the entrepreneurial city, placing this in the context, successively, of the evolving ‘commonsense’ of neoliberal governance, the emergence of austerity urbanism and the intensification of financialised restructuring. In tracing an arc from more abstract theory claims through to the specific circumstances of contemporary urban restructuring in the United States, the article sets the stage for the more granular and concrete analysis of ‘late-entrepreneurial’ Atlantic City to follow in Part 2. To the extent that it is necessary to construct some of this staging, this first part of the article reflects on some of the methodological implications of a conjunctural approach to urban studies

Pluralizing labour geography

The chapter presents a sympathetic overview of labour geography in its various and evolving forms. This has mapped the shifting politics of production, together with old and new forms of labour organization; it has problematized the workplace, as a site of struggle and as an arena for the performance of social identities; it has tracked the restructuring of labour markets, as spaces of socio-institutional stress and regulatory transformation; and it has deployed labour as a diagnostic for understanding different (local) varieties of capitalism, economies of care and reproduction, and alternative modes of socio-economic organization. The field has consequently been shaped by an accumulating array of concerns with (industrial) restructuring, (labour) regulation, (union) reorganization, and (social) reproduction

We are all Keynesians again...and always?

Geoff Mann’s provocative paper presents an exacting critique of Keynes’ economic philosophy, coupled with a meditation on the implications of the present ‘triple crisis’, especially for the Left. He has compelling things to say on both topics but is at his most provocative where he links them together. This takes the form of an intriguing (if somewhat quirky) proposition that all liberal responses to the recurrent crises and regulatory dilemmas of capitalism, at least since the early 19th century, have been in some fashion (but also essentially) ‘Keynesian’. The basis for this bold claim – the identification of what I will call a ‘meta-Keynesian’ mind-set – mostly comes from a deep reading of Keynes’ philosophy and not from historical analysis per se. Mann is persuasive on the provenance of Keynes’ philosophy, but I question his claims about the reach and (continuing) grip of Keynesian reason and about the inevitability of the economist’s ‘eternal return’. Keynes may have been a Hegelian, but I am not convinced that he is ‘our Hegel’; I am not even sure he is ‘our’ Keynes

Polanyi in space

The purpose of this chapter is to uncover something that for too long has been hidden practically in plain sight. It offers an exploratory appreciation of Polanyi’s potential as a spatial theorist, albeit a somewhat closeted one – that is, as a pioneering and creative analyst of geographically variegated economies. The pluralisation of this latter word is anything but casual, since Polanyi’s name has long been associated with the position that (all) economies are socially embedded and heterogeneously constituted, and that they are variably instituted or regulated, as well as with principled repudiations of (market) universalism, (stagist) teleology and (explanatory) monism (see Polanyi, 1957a, 1977; see also Gudeman, 2001; Burawoy, 2003; Hann and Hart, 2011). His is a body of work, furthermore, that by force of circumstances was produced under lifelong conditions of dislocation and displacement. It bears the hallmarks of a scholarly and indeed personal life lived in a somewhat stressed and liminal manner, the consequences of which included an elevated sensitivity to (historical and geographical) context and a somewhat paradoxical appreciation for the role of ‘embeddedness’ (see Dale, 2016a). Quite distinctively but hardly coincidentally, it is also a body of work founded on the recognition that pathways of socioeconomic development – past, present and future; real and imagined – are neither unidirectional nor singular. Having avoided the ‘fallacious assumption that all societies [have] operated on the same economic principles’ (Block and Somers, 2014: 65), Polanyi can be considered to be one of the original theorists of the hybrid, heterogeneous and pluralised economy, one that by definition is subject to uneven spatial development and contestable modes of regulation, to disequilibrating forces and endemic restructuring

Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing

Offshore outsourcing—the movement of jobs to lower-wage countries—is one of the defining features of globalization. Routine blue-collar work has been going offshore for decades, but the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s extended this process to many parts of the service economy. Politically controversial from the beginning, “offshoring” is conventionally seen as a threat to jobs, wages, and economic security in higher-income countries—having become synonymous with the dirty work of globalization. Even though the majority of corporations make some use of offshore outsourcing, fearful of negative publicity most now choose to manage these activities in a discreet manner. Partly as a result, the global sourcing business, now reckoned to be worth more than $120 billion, largely operates under the radar, its ocean-spanning activities in low-cost labor arbitrage being poorly documented and poorly understood. Offshore is the first sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing industry, its business practices, market dynamics, technologies, and politics. The book traces the complex transformation of the worlds of global sourcing, from its origins in the new international division of labor in the 1970s, through the rapid growth of back-office economies in India and the Philippines since the 1990s, to the development of “nearshore” markets in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Recently, this evolving process of geographical and organizational restructuring has included experiments in “backshoring” within low-cost, ex-urban locations in the United States and a wave of software-enabled automation, which threatens to remove labor from many back offices altogether

Geographies of policy : from transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation

The paper develops a geographical approach to the issues of policy transfer and transformation, taking the form of a critical dialogue with three literatures at the borderlands of political science, comparative institutionalism, and political sociology. Making the case for moving beyond rational-choice frameworks and essentialized, formalist representations of policy transfer, the paper advocates a social-constructivist understanding of policy mobilities-and-mutations, sensitive to the constitutive roles of spatiotemporal context

Austerity urbanism

Developed as a provisional formulation (and working concept) in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, austerity urbanism refers to the localized effects of the significant retrenchment and restructuring of public expenditures and services in the ensuing period, particularly in Europe and North America. Originating as a banking crisis, the Wall Street crash of 2008 was rapidly translated into a much wider crisis for the (social and welfare) state, for public-sector financing, and for (local) government service delivery, as the widely adopted policy of austerity involved expenditure cutbacks, often devolved to subnational or municipal tiers of government, along with a renewed emphasis on public-sector downsizing, privatization, outsourcing, and fee-for-service arrangements. In this way, both the costs and burdens of the crisis and its extended aftermath were “downloaded” to the local level, as indeed would be a disproportionate share of the political blame for the crisis, in the form of renewed accusations of municipal profligacy, political corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and abuses of labor union power

Cities beyond compare?

Calls for more substantively multipolar, comparative and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory-making have been circulating for more than a decade now, and they have begun to spawn a range of alternative approaches to urban studies. But in practice, the challenge of more worldly, comparative theorization has been unevenly met, often more through difference-finding and deconstructive manoeuvres than through projects of urban-theoretical renewal and reconstruction. The provisional outcome has been interpreted as an impasse in urban theory; some are even reporting its death. While these reports are surely premature, there are risks as well as opportunities in the embrace of particularism and polycentrism in urban studies, especially if this impedes: first, the effective realization of comparative methodologies; second, the theoretical interrogation of pan-urban processes and patterns, relationally understood; and third, constructive dialogue across theoretical traditions, notably at the interface between political economy and postcolonialism

Macroeconomic geographies

In dialogue with Ray Hudson’s paper on ‘rising powers’ in globalizing capitalism, this review article reflects on the position and priority of these macroscopic questions in the field of economic geography, focusing in particular on the prospects for a reanimated political economy of uneven spatial development. Two themes are explored. First, the paper asks what it means to confront the problematic of rising (and falling) capitalisms, and why it is that the vocabulary for this discussion has to be imported, if not improvised. Second, it explores what it might mean not just to revisit and re(in)state, but to reconstruct notions of uneven spatial development, which despite their virtually uncontestable status in the field of economic geography have in practice often been allowed recede into the explanatory background, either as an implicit ontological precondition or as little more than an ambient sensibility