Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper is an exploration of the relationship between stale policies and regional industrial change. It is argued that the main proximate cause of deindustrialization in peripheral regions of Great Britain has been nationalized industry policies. The formation, implementation, and effects of regional policies to provide new jobs must be considered in this context. The relationships between these different state policies are explored and their implications for development in peripheral regions are discussed.

The division between the spheres of production and of social reproduction and consumption is common in social geography. In this paper it is argued that a more complete view of social reality and of social change may be gained by looking at links between these spheres in a given locality. This contention is supported by a case study of some of the housing policies of the London Docklands Development Corporation. This government-sponsored agency, it is argued, set out to affect a simultaneous transformation of both spheres in its area of operation. The implications of this policy are discussed.

The neighbourhood effect in voting studies is defined as the concentration of votes for a party in a place which is greater than expected. It is usually accounted for as the consequence of biased flows of relevant information through local social networks, and no reference is made to the role of political parties in the manipulation of those flows and networks. Such a role was referred to in pioneer geographical studies, but has largely been ignored since, apparently because it does not readily fit into the spatial science paradigm. It is argued that the agenda-setting role of parties and the importance of local organisation are crucial influences on voting patterns. Parties are embedded in local cultures and are involved in their creation.

In studies of the relationship between peripheral ethnic minority groups and the larger society in industrialised societies, it is commonly assumed that the minority is in the process of assimilation or is becoming economically dependent, A number of theoretical arguments on the nature of change are reviewed. The case of Gypsy communities in Europe and North America is used to demonstrate the inappropriateness of theories that predict a transformation of the minority group's culture—a picture of continuity and persistence appears more reasonable in the light of historical and fieldwork evidence.

Historically, geographers have been keen to adopt bodies of theory from other disciplines in a somewhat uncritical manner. This practice has surfaced again in the recent attempts to apply notions from catastrophe theory to the study of regional development. This paper is an examination of one such application to the modeling of interregional capital flows and critically evaluates it from a number of perspectives. On empirical grounds, there is little evidence that ‘catastrophic’ shifts in the geography of US manufacturing capital have indeed occurred. The presumption of a catastrophic shift is shown to be based on poor empirical indicators of capital mobility or on an incomplete understanding of the process of interregional investment decisions. The paper offers an alternative conception of this process in which the Kaldorian principles of scale economies, specialization, and division of labour are shown to be in continuing operation, albeit now in a spatially discontinuous manner.

Pastoral nomads in Africa and the Middle East have recently come under intensifying contacts with governments through processes of sedentarization and social modernization. The dialectics of these processes have the capacity to make nomads dependent upon public goods, thus equipping governments with manipulative tools to bring nomads under political control. A major tool in this regard has been the delivery of public educational services. This paper is an attempt first to provide a theoretical framework of the spatial, social, and cultural manipulation of pastoral nomads through the process of delivering educational services. The case is then examined of delivering these services to the Israeli Negev Bedouin who, unlike other nomadic societies, have been undergoing processes of sedentarization and social modernization within a modern Jewish state.