Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Studies of information technologies in workplaces are of growing significance to people in a broad range of professions and organizations, particularly those involved in the development of new technologies. The authors examine two kinds of information technologies for the support of service technicians, which have been developed in a copier customer service and support company. One is a mobile self-dispatch system with which service technicians monitor a list of customers' requests to repair machines in their service area. The other is a knowledge system. Particular attention is paid to investigating how these systems are embedded in a specific sociotechnological organization and work in service technicians' daily activities. Through the analysis of service technicians' activities, and interviews, the authors show that service technicians organize and make their workspace and activities visible with these technologies.

In an attempt to understand some of the issues involved in the problem of mobility, the author examines the notion of mobility by locating it in the actual and local context where people try to deal with it as their practical problem, following ethnomethodological policy. This way of understanding the local character of mobility has two advantages: one is that it allows us to understand the notion in terms of the social organization of activities as part of which it is managed by relevant members, rather than understanding it in a purely theoretical manner. The other advantage is that it offers us a detailed and concrete understanding of the environment in relation to people's activities that potentially can be used as a basis for some sensitive tools for designing or redesigning the environment in terms of its specific arrangement of mobility. Detailed observations are made on the emergency medical system to illustrate the complex temporal and spatial arrangements involved in moving a patient from one place to another, providing necessary medical treatment on the way, and coordinating different expertise in organizationally and geographically different locations.

In this paper we examine the spatial practices of mobile workers—how mobile workers manage their use of technology and place. Data from interviews with highly mobile workers and ‘hot-deskers’ are used to explore the reciprocal relationship between practice and place: how places change work, but also how work changes places. Mobile workers often need to configure their activities to take account of the different places in which they find themselves. This can involve considerable ‘juggling’ of their plans, humble office equipment, and their coworkers. In turn mobile workers change places, as they appropriate different sites for their work. Specifically, technology allows for the limited reappropriation of travel and leisure sites as places for work (such as trains and cafés). Time is also an important practical concern for mobile workers. Although mobile work may be seen as relatively flexible, fixed temporal structures allow mobile workers to ‘accomplish synchronicity’ with others. Although this paper focuses on the specific practices of mobile workers, it also explores how ‘grand social theory’ can help us understand the practical details of mobile work, yet how practice cannot be simply reduced to theory.

In this paper I investigate the ways in which participants in mobile-phone conversations orient to each other's location, activities, and availability. By looking at data from recorded mobile-phone conversations, I use a conversation analytic approach to make initial observations on the character of mobile-phone conversations. I found that the frequent question “what are you doing?” sometimes caused a location to be given as part of the answer which shows how location, activity, and availability are strongly related. The participants thus obtained information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it provided information about a future meeting. In some of the conversations where it seemed there was something going on where the ‘called party’ was located, the ‘caller’ reacted by initiating the conversation with a strategy which gave the called party a chance to end the conversation.

EDEN, a famous garden, is also an acronym for the Electronic Democracy European Network, a project involving a consortium of public administrations (local authorities), academic institutions and technology companies. The thirty-month project aims to improve communication between the administrations and citizens in decision-making processes to do with urban planning, and at time of writing is in the transition from ‘requirements analysis’ to implementation of a software toolkit. The EDEN project is concerned, amongst other things, with the mobility of messages to and from urban planning officers in public administrations. Mobility, that is, from people ‘outside’ a city administration to people ‘inside’ it via a website, a virtual place from where messages are to be routed to a correct destination. The planning of virtual urban places is a new concern for both urban planners and systems designers working to implement ‘information society’ initiatives. These two occupations and research fields share similar methodologies, models, and artifacts used to intervene in the practices of their clients. This paper describes how the practices through which planning is made political have been represented in the ‘requirements analysis’ of the EDEN toolkit. The politics of the project do not just lie in its objective, the reconfiguring of ‘virtual’ political geographies in parallel with the ‘real’. The distinctions made between virtual and real politics are themselves political. Setting aside any essential differences between the two, we will look instead at the politics of representation and representations embedded in the EDEN project and software.

In this paper, I contest the claim that cultural geography is ‘irrelevant’ to policy addressing major social justice issues. Engaging both with the ‘relevance’ and the ‘culture–economy’ debates in human geography, and with wider feminist political theory, I argue that the recognition of issues of ‘cultural justice’ is crucial to an effective engagement with social justice issues. I suggest a new approach to the cultural economy debate that neither forces a choice between culture and economy, nor only ‘transcends’ their division. Instead, the concept of ‘revaluing’ is introduced, which encompasses both the cultural and the economic but allows one or the other, or both, to be asserted—depending on the spatial and political context. These points are developed through a qualitative case study of the Single Regeneration Budget, a policy which attempts to address social exclusion, inequality, and deprivation. This case study suggests that a lack of attention to cultural justice issues, such as recognition and respect, leads to a policy that fails to remedy, and even perpetuates, the exclusionary mechanisms it seeks to address. Instead, a more fundamental revaluing of socially excluded people and places needs to be carried out in order to achieve greater inclusion. Indeed, reflecting on these issues through cultural and feminist lenses, I suggest a wider remit than policy for human geographers to engage effectively with major social justice issues.

Focusing on low-skilled workers, I present an empirical analysis of the relationship between transit-based job accessibility and employment outcomes for workers without automobiles. The metropolitan areas examined are Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Two essential components of the analysis are the calculation of refined job-access measures that take into account travel modes as well as the supply and demand of the labor market, and the incorporation of job-access measures into multinomial logit models. The results indicate that improved transit-based job accessibility significantly augments both the probability of being employed and the probability of working 30 hours or more per week for autoless workers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Further, in these two areas, job accessibility has a greater effect for autoless workers than for auto-owning workers. Job accessibility plays a more significant role in employment outcomes for autoless workers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, highly auto-dependent areas, than it does in Boston, a more compact area with relatively well-developed transit systems. The empirical findings hold important implications for the theory and policy debate surrounding spatial mismatch.

The authors report on the development and test of a rule-based model of tourist destination choice, using decision tables to represent the rules that specify the conditions under which particular destination choices are made. Rules are extracted from empirical data on tourist destination choice, collected in the Netherlands in 1998. The specification of the model and its performance are discussed.

Issues of regional innovation and learning have attracted growing interest from economic geographers and related specialists in recent years. The advantages to be gained from localised networks and learning are claimed to be particularly important for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in helping offset the size-related advantages of larger firms. Such claims are part of a wider rediscovery of the benefits of clustering and agglomeration in economic geography. Yet, to date, theoretical speculation about the renewed importance of geographical clustering for SMEs has run ahead of detailed empirical research. Beyond a few well-known case studies of high-technology clusters, there have been few attempts systematically to ‘test’ assertions made about the links between innovation, collaboration, and learning. The authors' purpose in this paper is to contribute new empirical evidence to this debate through a case study of SMEs in the Aberdeen oil complex. Although they find some evidence to support the role of localised forms of collaboration among the most innovative SMEs, the authors' results also indicate the importance of extralocal networks of knowledge transfer and the unequal power relations that underpin interfirm relations. These findings reinforce recent calls for a shift of focus from ‘regions’ to ‘networks’, raising some fundamental questions about the substantive basis of clusters policy.