Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The author takes as his point of departure David Harvey's original formulation of territorial social justice and recognises the subsequent emergence of a politics of difference as central to the discourse of justice. The contemporary preoccupation with difference is problematised. The argument proceeds from recognition of morally significant aspects of human sameness, through the identification of human needs and the case for associated rights, to an egalitarian conception of social justice. The Earths uneven resource endowment, a traditional disciplinary preoccupation, is viewed as morally arbitrary and hence an aspect of difference to be transcended. The paper concludes with some observations on moral motivation, asking why we should actively endorse social justice.

The term globalisation has been employed to denote the global integration of finance, the emergence of global corporations, the development of institutions of global governance, the global implications of environmental crises, and the commodification of previously nonmarketed arenas of social life. The author argues that globalisation needs, rather, to be conceived theoretically as the sectoral and spatial unification of systems of valuation. Using this definition, and a study of the development of trade and economic policy in Australia, he argues that there is variety of forms of globalisation, a variety of internal reasons for the emergence of policies that enhance globalised forms of economy within countries, and therefore a variety of policy responses to it.

The author argues that radical geography needs a political revival. Of many avenues that might be followed, the areas of consumption and commodity chains are taken up for consideration. Revival involves a critique of certain trendy, theoretical approaches prevalent particularly in the study of the commodity—as with postmodern notions of the sign and image space, the new retail geography with its stress on identity, and actor-network theory diverting into nonhuman actants. Although not without potential, these approaches lack critical, political edge, especially in the sense of connecting consumption with production. Liberation at one end is divorced from exploitation at the other. Nets are noticed but not workers. As an alternative, a materialist–semiotic analysis is proposed using the concept of commodity chains. This analysis has greater potential for theorizing connections between consumers and producers in a way that stimulates political praxis as well. Nine strategies for political engagement are proposed, from deconstructing advertisements to direct actions such as boycotts, anticorporate campaigns, and guerilla shopping tactics. The intention is to involve radical geography in a new politics of consumption.

The late 20th century has seen unions in the industrial and postindustrial countries retrench and struggle to develop new strategies and tactics in the face of a changing political economy. A challenge to the traditional conceptions of the appropriate place and scope of union activity comes from the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and its innovative leadership in the US-based Stop Sweatshops Campaign. Based on an analysis of the shifting locus of power in the garment industry, the union shifted its focus from the point of production to the place of consumption to pressure retailers who set prices within the industry. This strategy, which fulfills the prophecy of the consumptive turn earlier this century, applies a new geography and politics to labor struggles, and forces labor geographers to consider anew the relationship between consumption and production in our understanding of the changing economic landscape.

This paper outlines some key terms in a cultural analysis of economic systems. During empirical research I have concluded that radical geography in the tradition of political economy must employ cultural terms such as symbol, imaginary, and rationality. These terms link the material, through experience and interpretation, to the mental—consciousness, intentionality, and rationality. I argue that culture understood as symbolic practice is compatible with historical materialism in the tradition of Gramsci, Thompson, and Williams. The paper applies cultural materialism to the explanation of economic rationalities and developmental logics by drawing on Weberian sociology. These ideas are exemplified by a brief account of the New England moral economy. The paper concludes by calling for a new type of critical inquiry called cultural economy.

In this paper I compare and contrast the alternative treatments of the Other as they appear first in the radical geography of 1968, then in the political geography of 1998. While in the Hegelian sixties both the master and the slave recognized that they are defined in terms of each other (a = b), the politically correct of the nineties are claiming that the right to define who you are is yours and yours alone (a = a). But whoever argues that the only acceptable truth lies in the statement “I am who I am” is in effect adopting the same conception of power that the Old Testament JHWH reserved for himself.

During the 1970s, poor neighborhoods of New York City lost significant proportions of housing and associated community structure to a policy-driven process of contagious fire and building abandonment. The south Bronx was among the most heavily damaged areas. Here we analyze and compare the interrelationships between socioeconomic factors, housing, demographics, and two health outcomes (low-weight birth rate and homicide rate) in the southwest Bronx and in Upper Manhattan (Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood), using standard statistical methods as well as the Ives amplification factor employed by ecologists. Upper Manhattan showed much stronger and less ‘resilient’ relationships between these factors than the southwest Bronx, that is, a system of tight ties which amplifies external perturbations. It indicates vulnerability to impacts such as economic decline, changes in municipal service provision, and ‘welfare reform’. We hypothesize that the looser, and more resilient, system of the southwest Bronx and the brittle system of Upper Manhattan arose from their different histories of catastrophic urban decay, a highly ‘path dependent’ evolutionary process affecting a social system, subjecting it to extreme selection pressures on the underlying social network structure. The difference has profound policy implications.

It is becoming increasingly important to understand the social and economic circumstances under which schools operate. Benchmarking school performance targets, contextualising performance outcomes, and Ofsted inspections all rely upon measures of the socioeconomic status of school populations. These tend to utilise administrative data—such as the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals—or census data for the ward or neighbourhood of wards in which a school is located. This last approach brings to bear the remarkable wealth of information contained within the census, but it suffers from the fact that schools seldom draw their pupils exclusively, or even predominately, from their immediate hinterlands. The authors discuss a method of estimating the socioeconomic characteristics of school populations which, using a program called NCP Profiler to link individual pupil postcodes with census data at the enumeration district level, is sensitive to the manner in which schools actually recruit students—an increasingly important consideration as the quasi-market in education leads to the effective dismantling of geographically defined school catchment areas.

The potential influence of changes in productivity is explored for each sector in each country on the intercountry Leontief-inverse of the European Union (EU) for two time periods, 1970 and 1980. The methodology employed is a weighted variant of the field of influence of column change; the empirical outcomes will be analyzed in three ways. First, the impact of comparable changes in productivity in every sector will be estimated in terms of its contribution to the aggregate value of the Leontief-inverse as well as on its spatial structure. From this estimation, propulsive sectors are identified as those sectors that produce the largest increase in the overall interdependence between all sectors in all EU-countries. Moreover, the propulsiveness of sectors will be spatially decomposed into four components: a ‘domestic’ effect, an ‘intercountry-spillover’, an ‘intercountry-return’, and a ‘rest of the EU’ effect on sectoral interdependence. Second, the analysis will examine how the columns of the intercountry Leontief inverse would change as a consequence of EU-wide changes in technology. This process will enable the identification of ‘reactive’ sectors, those sectors whose multipliers are most sensitive to EU-wide factor productivity increases. Third, the rows of the intercountry Leontief-inverse are considered in terms of their changes as a consequence of EU-wide changes in productivity. This approach identifies ‘dependent’ sectors, those sectors whose production level is most sensitive to overall changes in productivity within the EU.

Subsidiarity, the principle which says that action should be taken at the lowest effective level of governance, is a potentially powerful concept around which a debate about the optimal assignment of tasks across different administrative levels of the European Union (EU) could be constructed. Its sudden incorporation into mainstream European discourse in the early 1990s provided an unprecedented opportunity for such a debate to take place. However, for various reasons this opportunity was spurned and subsidiarity has since metamorphosed into a technical process of legislative reform dubbed ‘Better Law-Making’. By analysing recent experience in the water sector through the lens of ‘new’ institutional theory, the author reveals that, far from undermining the framework of EU environmental policy, instead, the reforms have led to the tightening of some existing standards, although less important issues are being devolved to national authorities. It is debatable whether the political outcomes of the reform process to date were fully expected or desired by those states that advocated greater subsidiarity in the first place. There is precious little evidence that European environmental governance has moved much ‘closer’ to European citizens as a result of subsidiarity.