Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper we examine how web-design firms in the new-media industry probe and experiment with possible forms and sources of value that give shape to the new economy. Focusing on the collaborative engineering of cross-disciplinary web-design project teams, we examine how websites emerge as provisional settlements among heterogeneous disciplines as they negotiate working compromises across competing performance criteria.

We focus on the social construction of innovativeness in the context of project teams and interfirm networks among new-media start-up firms in Silicon Alley, Manhattan. The analysis is based on a total of thirty-four interviews with firm executives and other informants. A brief discussion of the historical and structural context of the research project is followed by an exposition of the theoretical framework, that is, the theory of industrial districts and the hypothesized connection between innovativeness and interactivity. In each of the three subsequent sections of the paper, the empirical findings are presented and analyzed: the grounded conceptions of innovativeness, the two main variants of project organization (self-organized versus managerially coordinated project teams), and the varieties of interfirm networks such as transactional and mixed networks. Other networking practices documented are client relations and hiring. We consider the effect of state-level legal infrastructure and economic deregulation on the business culture of interfirm networking, information sharing, and innovativeness.

This is a detailed case history of one of London's iconic new-media companies, AMX Studios. Some of the changes in this firm, we assume, are not atypical for other firms in this sector. In particular we want to draw attention to two transformations. The first change in AMX and in London's new-media industry more generally refers to the field of industrial relations. What can be observed is a shift from a rather heterarchically organised new-media industry towards a more hierarchically organised one, a shift from short-term project networks to long-term client dependency. The second change refers to new-media products and services. We want to argue for a shift from cool content production towards consultancy and interactive communications solutions.

Like all forms of work, project work is constructed within the rules that govern labor and capital markets. In this paper, I examine how project work and the project workforce in ‘old’ media (motion pictures and television) and ‘new’ media (multimedia or Internet-based information, entertainment, and infotainment) have been affected by changes in the regulatory regime governing entertainment and information-intensive industries in the United States. Of particular significance is the role that collective bargaining institutions play in industry governance. In the case of old media, the regulatory regime initiated in the 1980s by the Reagan administration considerably reshaped the terrain for media production. ‘Virtual integration’ of a substantial portion of production resulted in the routinization of project work and decreased the need for collocation of preproduction, production, and postproduction in Los Angeles, the ‘home base’ of these industries. Old media, however, retained the key governance organizations that predated changes in regulation, particularly guilds and unions. New media, by contrast, emerged in the 1990s era of laissez-faire regulatory policy. ‘Consent decrees’, regulating competition in a wide range of industries were lifted, allowing firms to acquire, merge, and move freely both to concentrate economic power and to diversify. Unlike their old-media counterparts, new-media workers (and their employers) did not have the intermediary institutions to set the rules for employment, to define roles in project production, or to facilitate project management. For the new-media worker, and his or her employers, stronger dependence on interpersonal connections for credentials, legitimacy, and job match means stronger dependence on regional markets. The history of change and continuity in media project work can illuminate broader questions, such as how market regulation affects the location strategies of firms and workers.

The author examines the dynamics of manufacturing-employment change in thirteen European Union countries between 1978 and 1996, mainly through the utilisation of shift-share techniques. Despite the momentum that European integration gained over this period, the key finding is that the geography of manufacturing employment has remained almost intact. Processes operating at the European scale appear to have the largest impact on labour outcomes in each member state, while there is little deviation from the widespread declining trends. Spatial stability is reinforced even further through the homogeneity of several national industrial structures. In addition, the moderate increase in the industrial specialisation of the participating economies, and the localisation tendencies of a few traditional subsectors, pose little if any threat to the stability of the present map of manufacturing distribution. This evidence suggests that, contrary to some political rhetoric, the integration process has not, so far at least, adversely affected the relative competitiveness of manufacturing either in peripheral or in core countries.

We examine travel distance and its effect on total and on avoidable hospitalizations, using data from three health regions in British Columbia, Canada. We conceptualize distance to hospital in geographic and socioeconomic contexts from the care seeker's perspective, and develop a GIS procedure to generate variables for these contexts. The procedure includes geocoding hospital locations and patient locations to determine travel distance for each hospitalization, generating several geographic barriers such as mountain crossings, and linking patient-neighborhood locations to socioeconomic variables. The findings reveal that overall, hospitalization rates are inversely related to distance to hospital. Even though low-income patients are more likely to be hospitalized for avoidable conditions, the income effect influences different dimensions from those affected by the distance effect. A balanced approach may be needed to address issues appropriately at both the low and the high ends of physical accessibility.

This paper explores the production of farming identities and spaces, focusing especially on the relational construction of situated ethical identities. Using three case studies drawn from research with very small-scale farmers, the author examines processes of identification, drawing on ideas which suggest the importance of encounter, farming discourse, physical relation and heterogeneous association in the emergence of ethical identity in specific farming situations and places. The case studies examine the ethical positioning of interviewees, and their mobility of ethical identification, in relation to ‘other’ types of farmer and the human and nonhuman components of their farming assemblages. The paper illustrates the importance of examining situated farming moralities and identities in current debates over alternative ways of thinking about and practising agriculture, and over different ways of using rural space.

Most recent research on skilled migration focuses on those working in the financial sectors and there has been very little work in Europe on the migration of people in welfare sectors. In this paper we seek to explore some of the complexities of shifting labour markets and immigration regulations and their influence on the geography of migration of doctors to England. We argue that state regulations, both of immigration and those governing the medical labour force, have been altered to meet the specificities of internal labour-market shortages and that the level of the state remains a useful analytical level for understanding the skilled migration of doctors.