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

Failure and Strategic Projects: Australias Asia-Pacific Vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimension

The embeddedness of global production networks: The impact of crisis on Fiji's garment export sector

In this paper the author explores how changing geopolitical conditions reconfigure network embeddedness and theorises the conditions of network disconnection and transformation. Through a case study of the changes in interfirm relationships within the Fiji – Australia garment-production network after Fiji’s 2000 political coup d’état, the author develops a relational and dynamic view of embeddedness, highlighting its multifaceted and multiscalar character and emphasising the interrelationships between embeddedness, trust, and power

Understanding implementability in clinical trials : a pragmatic review and concept map

Background The translation of evidence from clinical trials into practice is complex. One approach to facilitating this translation is to consider the 'implementability' of trials as they are designed and conducted. Implementability of trials refers to characteristics of the design, execution and reporting of a late-phase clinical trial that can influence the capacity for the evidence generated by that trial to be implemented. On behalf of the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA), the national peak body representing networks of clinician researchers conducting investigator-initiated clinical trials, we conducted a pragmatic literature review to develop a concept map of implementability. Methods Documents were included in the review if they related to the design, conduct and reporting of late-phase clinical trials; described factors that increased or decreased the capacity of trials to be implemented; and were published after 2009 in English. Eligible documents included systematic reviews, guidance documents, tools or primary studies (if other designs were not available). With an expert reference group, we developed a preliminary concept map and conducted a snowballing search based on known relevant papers and websites of key organisations in May 2019. Results Sixty-five resources were included. A final map of 38 concepts was developed covering the domains of validity, relevance and usability across the design, conduct and reporting of a trial. The concepts drew on literature relating to implementation science, consumer engagement, pragmatic trials, reporting, research waste and other fields. No single resource addressed more than ten of the 38 concepts in the map. Conclusions The concept map provides trialists with a tool to think through a range of areas in which practical action could enhance the implementability of their trials. Future work could validate the strength of the associations between the concepts identified and implementability of trials and investigate the effectiveness of steps to address each concept. ACTA will use this concept map to develop guidance for trialists in Australia

Retrenchment and industry policy

The recent closure of the National Textiles plant in Newcastle has again brought the issue of plant closure in the textiles clothing and footwear (TcF) industries into the public arena. While National Textiles struggled to survive during the 1990s, many other TeF firms failed. This article details textiles clothing and footwear industry retrenchments in the period 1989 to 1996, the life of the previous government's TCF Plan. It discusses the complex interplay of forces that resuIted in plant closures and highlights the government's role in orchestrating the pattern and pace of change. The first section of the article briefly surveys different approaches to explaining plant closures. Following a description of changes in the industries since 1973 it then examines patterns of retrenchment, focusing on the relationship between job loss, government intervention and corporate re-organisation. Job loss cannot be interpreted solely as industry decline, but is intimately bound to firms' restructuring to secure their viability in an open economy. The conclusion contrasts managed and marketdriven approaches to micro-economic reform

Work, locality and the rhythms of capital

This book’s detailed exploration of the mutually constitutive relations between workplace processes, the development of places and localities and imperatives of capitalist accumulation is relevant to researchers of the labour process, urban and regional geography and political economy. In fact, one of its central objectives is to bring these fields together, and demonstrate ‘some ways in which their studies can and should be more closely interwoven’ (p. 9). Taking the workplace as the central unit of analysis, Gough analyses its embeddedness in a variety of processes and structures at larger spatial scales to expose the fundamental economic relationships that drive capitalist economies: the labour process, the local economy and capital accumulation. This contributes to economic geography’s understanding of multi-scalar relationships, causality and the problems of specificity

Casual employment and employer strategy

This paper examines how recruitment practices have shaped the increasing incidence of casual work in manufacturing firms. The growth of casual employment is seen as an outcome of recruitment practices developed to meet internal labour demands in the context of changing labour regulations and changing relationships between firms and the labour market. This paper highlights the heterogeneous nature of casual jobs, identifying six forms of casual employment each with different purposes, causes and longer term labour market implications. While casual employment is a function of 'demand-side' factors, the recruitment strategies that stimulale its growth are formed through managers' perceptions of the quality and reliability of the available labour supply

Clothing outwork : union strategy, labour regulation and labour market restructuring

On 12 March 1998 the Australian Industrial Relations Commission found that tbe clauses of the Clothing Trades Award dealing with the regulation of outwork in the clothing industry were allowable in their entirety under section 89A2(t) of the Workplace Relations Act 1996. This decision preserves the mechanisms that will enable the award to be enforced according to the industry's Homeworker Code of Practice. This paper describes the union's community action campaign against unregu lated clothing outwork, a campaign that bas successfully focused public attention on the need to establish safeguards for outworker employment at a time when employee protection more generally is under threat. It attributes tbe progress in regulating outwork to the union's public awareness campaign and its uneven impact on the competitive position of employers, to a resultant change in employer attitudes and strategies, and to the government's desire to quieten opposition to its industrial relations agenda

Non-regulatory Impediments to the Employment of Older Workers

Sets out to consider the 'Non-regulatory' impediments to the employment of older workers, including the difficulties faced by older workers remaining in employment and the difficulties experienced by older workers attempting to re-enter the labour market after a period of absence. It focuses on the issues that ageing presents for the labour market, and does not address the associated fiscal and welfare problems