Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The authors investigate the contemporary restructuring of the mobile-telecommunications industry with the use of a global production networks (GPNs) perspective. After a brief conceptual discussion of GPN, standard setting and embeddedness, their analysis proceeds in four further stages. First, they consider how technological change has driven the development of complex mobile telecommunications GPNs in a sector previously characterised by relatively linear and simple value chains. Second, they show how processes of deregulation and privatisation over the past two decades have enabled the internationalisation of mobile telecommunications provision. Third, they explore the delicate power balance between embedded state and corporate actors in telecommunications GPNs through a consideration of the changing bases of standard setting in the industry. Despite ongoing processes of globalisation, the continuing importance of national policies and strategies is clear. Fourth, they demonstrate the continuing importance and differentiating role of embeddedness in the transformation of corporate mobile telecommunication GPNs. In sum, it is argued that the mobile-telecommunications sector should be understood as a constellation of multiscalar manufacturing and distribution networks connecting together firms, organisations, and customers in geographically uneven ways.

With the aid of an empirical case study of the automobile industry in China, we explore how, under certain political–economic conditions, the investments of transnational corporations (TNCs) can be shaped to meet the state's objectives. We develop the concept of ‘obligated embeddedness’ to capture the dynamics of this process. We show that foreign direct investment in the automobile industry in China is a type of market-led and embedded investment which is characterised by joint ventures and the follow-up network configurations. However, to achieve such obligated embeddedness on the part of TNCs—and for the state and its citizens to gain its benefits—the state not only has to have the theoretical capacity to control access to assets located within its territory, but also the power actually to determine such access.

In this paper the author explores how changing geopolitical conditions reconfigure network embeddedness and theorises the conditions of network disconnection and transformation. Through a case study of the changes in interfirm relationships within the Fiji–Australia garment-production network after Fiji's 2000 political coup d'état, the author develops a relational and dynamic view of embeddedness, highlighting its multifaceted and multiscalar character and emphasising the interrelationships between embeddedness, trust, and power.

In this paper we analyze the emergence of R&D services in Bangalore, India, by focusing on the process of technological upgrading in the Indian software industry. The development trajectory of the Indian software industry and the upgrading it has experienced, from providing low-skill software services to providing high-skill R&D services, are examined using evidence from interviews with Indian firms in Bangalore. Whereas most research on the Indian software industry thus far has emphasized the role of the state and multinational corporations, in this paper we argue that active local entrepreneurship is playing an increasingly important role in technological upgrading and in the shift from low-skill to high-skill services in Bangalore. These shifts are being facilitated by growing institutional thickness, as evidenced by the accumulation of local expertise, increasing local entrepreneurship addressing specific market niches, and the development of a local technical community.

The authors explore the opportunities for existing Indian IT clusters to upgrade and undertake financial research activities. Wholesale financial activity and the accompanying financial research in banks are still highly concentrated in Western financial centers. Increasing competition in the financial services industry, as well as regulatory pressure, place the options of outsourcing and offshoring activities, especially research, to low-cost locations high on the agenda of financial institutions. For the first time, complex tasks at the core of financial activity are being offshored, which makes this an interesting case for a lot of other industries and their spatial economic organization in an ever-globalizing world. Will there be a World Financial Research Centre in Mumbai? With the aid of qualitative interview data as well as a quantitative analysis, the authors argue that research activities are locally embedded in Western financial centers to an extent that such a development is not likely. Two different research activities, country analysis and institutional equity analysis, are examined. The analysis suggests, however, that there is a certain potential for some research activities to be relocated to India. So far, investments take place in a very few existing IT clusters which have already gained a reputation in the financial community.

In this paper we use Bourdieu's concept of habitus to examine human–animal relationships within capitalist agricultural systems. In the first part of the paper we examine how Bourdieu's ideas have been used by academics to provide insights into the ways that livestock affect and are affected by farming practice. In the second part we build on these conceptual, empirical, and policy insights by examining some of the national and international social networks that contribute to human–animal relationships in capitalistic farming. We focus on a case study of Welsh livestock and, in particular, the historic and contemporary roles that breed societies play in the imagination of farm animals and the creation of capitals in agriculture.

Drawing upon studies of subnational (internal) family migration, in this paper we link international family migration to differential labour-market participation in Great Britain. We extend Kofman's fourfold categorisation of international family migration processes to develop a typology of scenarios that acknowledge the important role of the family. We match scenarios to different out-comes using a subsample of partnered migrants from the Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) of the 1991 Census. In line with subnational family migration literature, descriptive analyses of the SAR point to a ‘gender gap’ between the labour-market participation of partnered men and partnered women moving into Great Britain between 1990–1991, with males twice as likely to be attached to the labour force compared with women. We contribute to debates on changing family organisation and employment returns to international migration by arguing that the magnitude of this gender gap varies across migration scenario and family structure. In this paper we stress the need for more interchange between international and subnational family-migration scholarship, and provide valuable entrees for analyses of the forthcoming microdata of the 2001 Census.

The UK government has made the sustainable reuse of land a strong policy aim in its sustainable development and planning strategies. However, in this paper we present research into recent urban brownfield redevelopments in England that shows that many aspects of sustainability are currently not being considered in practice. To explain this, we focus on the role of different stakeholders involved in brownfield development and critically examine their actions and decisions. We establish which stakeholder types (for example, architects, planners, councillors, developers, investors) are more likely to attempt to introduce sustainability into development projects and which are more successful in meeting their agendas. We conclude by identifying five reasons for variation in the achievement of sustainability in brownfield development.

Although the Toronto metropolitan region performs well relative to its North American counterparts in terms of density and public-transit use, it does not derive as much walking and public-transit patronage benefit from its high-residential-density areas as it could. The impact of residential density on journey patterns is limited by an imperfect juxtaposition of density and public-transit service peaks. Another impediment is the difficulty of associating density with other variables needed for it to translate into increased walking and public-transit modal shares. We attribute this situation to insufficient planning capacity owing in large part to generalized neighbourhood opposition to high-density residential developments and disagreement between levels of government. In this paper we both narrate events of relevance to the distribution of high residential density over the last five decades and analyze present relationships between high-density areas and journey patterns. We conclude by discussing the possibility of achieving residential-density layouts and distributions that are more conducive to walking and public-transit use than the tower-in-the-park model and the scattering of high-density pockets, both of which predominate in Toronto.