Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The focus of this paper is on the theorisation of the spatialities of globalisation. I seek to shift the emphasis away from the currently dominant discourse of scalar and territorial relativisation, towards relational processes and network forms of organisation that defy a linear distinction between place and space. I stress the importance of actor networks of varying length and duration as well as the world of practices as the central components of a topographical understanding of globalisation. What this might mean in terms of a theorisation of place is illustrated through a discussion of the geography of the urban economy and a discussion of the politics of place.

We seek to trace the construction and circulation of the investment category of ‘emerging markets’, reflecting on the geographies contained therein. To this end, drawing on face-to-face interviews, we investigate the production and circulation of specialist expertise and knowledge amongst British-based managers and analysts. This involves starting to trace networks of information, movement, and command that connect fund managers and analysts in global financial centres such as the City of London with emerging market economies. We conclude with reflections on the distinctiveness of emerging markets analysis, arguing that these lie in the rhetorical strategies used to promote emerging markets investments and the ways that these are internalised and enacted by analysts.

Measuring the degree and extent of economic globalization is subject to a variety of issues ranging from theoretical conceptualization to the selection of appropriate data. This examination of economic globalization underscores the importance of a geographic perspective that is necessarily situated within a temporal context. International trade data and exploratory spatial data analyses are used to assess patterns of economic globalization between 1970 and 1997. Results indicate that preserving topological relationships between states in the global economy can guide, inform, and extend future studies of the processes and patterns of economic globalization.

A number of possible advantages of industry agglomeration—or spatial clustering—have been identified in the research literature, notably those related to shared costs for infrastructure, the build-up of a skilled labour force, transaction efficiency, and knowledge spillovers leading to firm learning and innovation. We identify two shortcomings of existing research on the clustering phenomenon. First, the abundance of theoretical concepts and explanations stands in sharp contrast with the general lack of work aimed at validating these mechanisms empirically and the contradictory evidence found in recent empirical work in the field. Second, there is still a lack of a unified theoretical framework for analyzing spatial clustering. In an attempt to remedy the latter shortcoming, this paper investigates the nature of the cluster from a knowledge-creation or learning perspective. We argue for the need to establish a specific theory of the cluster where learning occupies centre stage. The basic requirements for such a theory of the cluster are discussed. Two main components of such a theory are identified: it must explain the existence of the cluster on the one hand and its internal organization on the other.

Debates over the role of knowledge and know-how as key economic assets in the contemporary economy, although far from new, are now increasingly couched in terms of a new-found economic immateriality which allows for their costless reproduction and widespread geographical dissemination. In the rush to tie down and reproduce economic know-how in abstract codifiable form, it has become almost baffling to argue that our stock of economic knowledge may rest upon affects as much as analysis, expressive symbolism as much as abstract symbolism. This paper is an attempt to think through how such ‘elusive’ economic knowledges may be grasped, yet neither formalized nor codified in abstract terms. It is also a plea to consider the geography of economic knowledge outside of the tacit – explicit distinction.

Hailed by economists as an idea whose time has come, the ‘new economic geography’ has not been quite as favourably received by geographers. Frequently seen as a prime case of academic imperialism, few appear willing to concede that economists may have something to contribute to economic geography. Conversely, beyond the token reference to vintage publications, economists often dismiss geographers' economic geography as a dead end. In this paper we take a more detached view. Exploring points of convergence and divergence, we identify lessons that either side may learn from the other. While not shying away from existing differences, we conclude that there is indeed some common ground.

In this paper I use the notion of performance, especially as it has been theorized within the science studies literature, to begin to make sense of the history and continuing practices of economic geography. I argue that not only humans perform, but also objects. In this paper, I focus on the performance of books, and in particular, textbooks, or as Bruno Latour calls them, ‘immutable mobiles’. I argue that textbooks bring four attributes to their performance: they travel easily over distance, thereby bringing their message to a geographically diffuse audience; they allow for ‘an optical and semiotic homogeneity’, that is, they take quite different pieces of the world, and bring them together, manipulating them and controlling them, on the same page; they represent an obligatory passage point in the sense that once they are accepted as the standard summary of a field they are necessarily acknowledged by successors; and finally, their effectiveness is in part a consequence of their rhetoric—defined as the ability to draw together and integrate within the text a wide range of sources and authors. These arguments about the performance of textbooks are illustrated by two case studies. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography, published in 1889, which helps launch economic geography as an academic discipline within Anglo-America. The second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography, published in 1965, which in many ways codifies the quantitative and theoretical revolution that first emerged in the United States in the late 1950s.

In this paper I report on research which traces out the fields-of-learning of underwriters working in the life assurance industry in Bristol. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, the financial services sector in Bristol, like that of many regional financial centres in the United Kingdom, grew significantly. Of particular note has been the local expansion, through relocation and new firm formation, of the life assurance industry. I argue that underwriting, concerned as it is with the management and production of risk, plays a central role in defining and distinguishing life assurance as a distinctive form of economic activity. By placing underwriting in Bristol within the wider configurations of the life underwriting community-of-practice I seek to determine the role of local actants in constituting insurantial practices. I argue that the city of Bristol is a significant space within the geography of life underwriting and, in turn, the manufacture of life assurance risk. However, in attempting to assess exactly how significant, some of the limitations of thinking about financial space in terms of regional and network topologies become apparent. In taking seriously the anthropology of financial communities-of-practice, institutions, and ‘network(ing)s’ I conclude that we may therefore need to think about financial centres and financial space in new ways.

When people commute to work longer or farther than the actual spatial arrangement of homes and workplaces suggest they could be commuting, people are engaging in excess commuting. In the aggregate, excess commuting is the nonoptimal or surplus work travel occurring in cities because people do not minimize their journeys to work. In this paper an alternative view of excess commuting based on a theoretical maximum commute is presented. The calculation of a theoretical maximum commute allows for an analysis of the range between the theoretical minimum and maximum commutes, which marks an improvement over current approaches to the measure of excess commuting. Conceptually, this range is taken to be the commuting capacity of a city. To what extent commuting capacity is consumed in terms of current levels of commuting forms a primary question of the analysis. A model is formulated and applied to 1990 Census data for a sample of US cities. Numerical and visual results suggest variation in the amount of excess commuting and consumed commuting potential for the sample of cities. The results also suggest a relationship between the jobs – housing balance of a city (as captured by its theoretical minimum commute) and its observed commute. Additionally, the maximization calculation is shown to provide insight into the degree of decentralized urban form. A conclusion is provided which relates the findings of this research to larger issues of urban sustainability.