Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner? The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological conceptualization of financial markets, and examine who the actors within them are, how they operate within which networks, and under which cognitive and cultural assumptions. Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, cognition and emotions, and global interaction are studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning underlying these institutions. Financial markets also have a structural impact on the governance of social and economic institutions. Until now, sociologists have examined issues of governance mostly with respect to the legal framework of financial transactions. Contributions in this book highlight the ways in which financial markets shape the inner working and structure of corporations and their governance. Finally, the book seeks to investigate the symbolic aspects of financial markets. Financial markets affect not only economic and social structures but also societal cultural images and frameworks of meaning. Barbara Czarniawska demonstrates how representations of gender relationships are a case in point. Arguing that financial markets are not simply neutral with respect to questions of gender but enhance certain images and interpretations of men and women. Addressing many important topics from a sociological perspective for the first time, this book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of financial markets in Business, Management, Economics, Finance and Sociology.

First published in 1992, this Routledge Revival sees the reissue of a truly original exploration of the nature of urbanization and capitalism. Linda Clarke's vital work argues that: Urbanization is a product of the social human labour engaged in building as well as a concentration of the labour force. The quality of the labour process determines the development of production. Changes to the built environment reflect changes in the production process and, in particular, the development of wage labour. To support these arguments, the author identifies a qualitatively new historical stage of capitalist building production involving a significant expansion of wage labour, and hence capital, and the transition from artisan to industrial production. Linda Clarke draws from a wide range of original material relating to the development of London from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century to provide a complete description of the development process: materials extraction, roadbuilding, housebuilding, paving, cleansing, etc; profiles of builders and contractors involved, and a picture of the new working class communities, as in Somers Town - their living conditions, population, working environment, and politics.

First published in 1984, this book analyses contemporary changes in industry, employment, education, science and technology, social attitudes and values in the USA, leading to the emergence of a new geography of post-industrial America. David Clark emphasizes the distributional processes and trends that have occurred over the post-war period. Data are analysed by reference to the then most recent census, of 1980. Throughout, the book provides a valuable and very comprehensive text that will be welcomed by all those wishing to study the geography of the contemporary USA.

The purpose of this book is to provide a guided tour through the theoretical foundations of spatial locations of firms and industries in an evolutionary economic framework. It addresses the issues of how a location of business in geographical space is selected and where economic activity may (re)locate in the future. The analysis is in the context of technological progress, innovation, disequilibrium and endemic uncertainty. Jovanovic raises pertinent questions such as how willing, motivated and able firms (and governments) are to adapt to constantly evolving new opportunities and challenges over time and to experiment and translate these perceptions into profitable actions. How is their 'competitive position' evolving relative to others and changing over time when faced with a stream of constantly arriving new opportunities, threats and obstacles? Considerations are always supported with a plethora of examples and cases from real life. Jovanovic argues that the economy is a complex and constantly adaptive system which is almost always outside equilibrium. Building on this, he suggests that there is an important lacuna in our understanding of evolutionary spatial economics and that there is much space for further multidisciplinary research in this academic and practical area. This book offers an evolutionary and disequilibrium analysis of the subject and makes parallels, where appropriate and possible, among economics, geography, physics, biology and art. It considers key areas in theory, market and production structure, spatial location of domestic and foreign firms, as well as regional policy. In addition, there are references to policy intervention; importance of investment in local social stability, education and training; as well as to uncontrollable variables that are beyond the influence of firms, industries, regions or public authorities. The author offers various evolutionary insights and alternatives to the pure neoclassical equilibrium economic model.

This wide-ranging Handbook is the first major compilation of the theoretical and empirical research that is forging the new and exciting paradigm of evolutionary economic geography. The book's distinguished contributors set out the theoretical, methodological and empirical foundations of an evolutionary perspective on the economic landscape. In so doing, they explore the interplay between organizational dynamics, industrial dynamics and space; analyze the nature and spatial evolution of networks; address the evolution of institutions in territorial contexts; and explore the evolution of agglomerations and clusters. This original reference work will undoubtedly play an important and formative role in influencing the future research agenda of evolutionary economic geography. It will strongly appeal to scholars, researchers and students in economic geography, regional economics, evolutionary economics, industrial economics, management and organizational studies, and related fields. Contributors: C. Antonelli, R. Boschma, G. Bottazzi, S. Breschi, U. Cantner, G. Cioccarelli, P. Cooke, M.S. Dahl, B. Dalum, C. de Laurentis, S. Denicolai, P. Dindo, J. Essletzbichler, L. Fleming, K. Frenken, E. Giuliani, J. Gluckler, H. Graf, R. Hassink, S. Iammarino, J. Lambooy, C. Lenzi, F. Lissoni, A. Malmberg, R. Martin, P. Maskell, P. McCann, C.R. Ostergaard, D.L. Rigby, J.W. Rivkin, E.W. Schamp, J. Simmie, O. Sorenson, U. Staber, E. Stam, S. Strambach, P. Sunley, A. Vezzulli, A. Zucchella

Fierce competitiveness between established and emerging major cities, such as Berlin, London, Shanghai and Sydney, has led to a pressure to excel as desirable locations for business, cultural activities, highly skilled migrants and tourists. At the same time, the transformation of settled and new migrant communities creates complex urban borders and variegated representations (academic, cinematic, popular, official) of the city. While cities increasingly deploy cosmopolitan images portraying the diversity of past and present populations and activities, this continues to coexist with parochialism as a mood and mode of cultural formations and a reflection of local specificities. This volume brings together cultural analysts, social scientists, and media and film scholars to explore the ways in which core cities generate competing claims on, and visions of, their use and their future, and thus have engaged with the necessity to brand their image for international consumption and for internal coherence.

Environmental issues now loom large on the social, political, and business agenda. Over the past four decades, "corporate environmentalism" has emerged and been constantly redefined, from regulatory compliance to more recent management conceptions such as "pollution prevention," "total quality environmental management," "industrial ecology," "life cycle analysis," "environmental strategy," "environmental justice," and, most recently, "sustainable development."
As a result, understanding the intersection of business activity and environmental protection has become increasingly complex, and there has emerged a focus in academic research on business decision-making, firm behavior, and the protection of the natural environment. This handbook reviews the state of the field as it grows into a mature area of study within management science, its achievements, and its future avenues of research. It brings together original contributions in the field along several lines of enquiry. The first six focus on disciplines as delineated in contemporary business schools: business strategy; policy and non-market strategies; organizational theory and behavior; operations and technology; marketing; and accounting and finance. The seventh section reviews emergent and associated perspectives, whilst a concluding section, written by long-standing leaders in the field, discusses the future outlook for research.

Pastoralism as a land use system is under recognized in terms of its contribution to food provision, livelihoods as well as to human security. This book is the first attempt to explore the dynamics of economic spaces of pastoral production and commodity systems for explicit South and North positionings. It develops and applies a new approach in combining agri-food, market and commodity chain perspectives with livelihood approaches. This enables new understandings of re-aligning exchange relations between the global south and the global north. The case studies presented open up new empirical insights in largely under-researched areas, such as Afghanistan, Chad, Tibet and Siberia and very recent changes in industrialized economies with major pastoral sectors. The book reveals new evidence and theoretical insights about significant changes in established producer-consumer relations in agriculture and food.

Individuals, consumer groups, nation states and supra-national bodies increasingly have interrogated the ethics of particular production and consumption relations such as GM foods. Flowing from and bound up with these political concerns is the growing interest in the mutual dependence of sites of (for example) production, distribution, retailing, design, advertising, marketing and final consumption. This timely volume draws together contributions concerned with the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. Not only do these case study examples seek to transcend older understandings of production and consumption, but they also explicitly tap into wider public debate about the meanings, origins and biographies of commodities. Taking a geographical approach to the analysis of links between producers and consumers, the book focuses upon the ways in which these ties increasingly are stretched across spaces and places. Critical engagements with the ways in which these spaces and places affect the economies, cultures and politics of the connections between producers and consumers are skilfully threaded through each section.

Drawing on the theoretical resources of institutional economics, The New Industrial Geography opens new perspectives in economic geography. In its focus on historical and geographical context, institutional embeddedness, and tacit rules and formal regulations, institutional economics is shown to be the perfect basis for understanding the profound economic and geographical changes of the last two decades, and on which also to build a new kind of industrial geography. Issues covered include: the retheorization of the geography of industrial districts; the analysis of institutional 'thickness', and the economic-geographical effects of institutional rigidity and sclerosis; the economic-geographical consequences of new regulatory bodies and policies; and the geographically situated character of institutions and regulatory frameworks, and the effects of separating them from their originating context; the development of new strategies for achieving more equitable forms of regional development.

Countering the many claims that the best days of capitalism are over following the economic meltdown of 2008 onwards, this book provocatively argues that a new golden age of capitalism - or upwave - began around 2002, and despite the unstable markets in the western world of the past few years, this upwave will produce previously unseen levels of wealth creation during the next twenty years. Basing this theory on the commercialisation of new technologies and the growth of new markets, the author claims that these positive trends are key to economic recovery in the US, UK and Europe. It argues that the most serious problem facing some countries in the west is government debt and that macroeconomic policy is of limited use in flexible and adaptive economies, where innovation, entrepreneurship and private investment should be encouraged in a range of cities and city regions. This highly original book will interest those concerned with national economies, nation states and urban policy.

First published in 1992, this Routledge Revival sees the reissue of a truly original exploration of the nature of urbanization and capitalism. Linda Clarke's vital work argues that: Urbanization is a product of the social human labour engaged in building as well as a concentration of the labour force. The quality of the labour process determines the development of production. Changes to the built environment reflect changes in the production process and, in particular, the development of wage labour. To support these arguments, the author identifies a qualitatively new historical stage of capitalist building production involving a significant expansion of wage labour, and hence capital, and the transition from artisan to industrial production. Linda Clarke draws from a wide range of original material relating to the development of London from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century to provide a complete description of the development process: materials extraction, roadbuilding, housebuilding, paving, cleansing, etc; profiles of builders and contractors involved, and a picture of the new working class communities, as in Somers Town - their living conditions, population, working environment, and politics.

What is a Global City? Who authorizes the World Class City? This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.

First published in 1998, this volume, spanning a lifetime's research, is a highly innovative first attempt at a consistent theoretical approach to the elements, structures and dynamics of the geography of agents, settlements and trade. Cause and effect are replaced by chance within constraints. Populations are substituted for unreal representative individuals, variability for uniformity, probabilistic process for unique history. Ignorance is a major factor in interpersonal and inter-areal commercial relations so that the focus is on flows of information and their effects on the efficiency of the economy or, alternatively, on changes in its information content. Recent work on spatial arrangements in many physical and social sciences is incorporated but always interpreted from an overriding geographical viewpoint. Key concepts are locational potential, distance friction, mobility, diffusion, spatial pattern and texture, adaptability, efficiency, spatial interaction and dependence. Analytic methods include autocovariance and transfer functions, areal special densities and entropy. Various forms of self-organization of economic spatial patterns are examined.

Space is a crucial variable in any economic activity. Spatial Economics is the branch of economics that explicitly aims to incorporate the space dimension in the analysis of economic phenomena. From its beginning in the last century, Spatial Economics has contributed to the understanding of the economy by developing plenty of theoretical models as well as econometric techniques having the "space" as a core dimension of the analysis.This edited volume addresses the complex issue of Spatial Economics from an applied point of view. This volume is part of a more complex project including another edited volume (Spatial Economics Volume I: Theory) collecting original papers which address Spatial Economics from a theoretical perspective.

This book aims to analyze Lesotho's prospects for economic advancement, and examines the influence of the policies and economic development of South Africa on Lesotho's own potential for development.

Space is a crucial variable in any economic activity. Spatial Economics is the branch of economics that explicitly aims to incorporate the space dimension in the analysis of economic phenomena. From its beginning in the last century, Spatial Economics has contributed to the understanding of the economy by developing plenty of theoretical models as well as econometric techniques having the "space" as a core dimension of the analysis. This edited volume addresses the complex issue of Spatial Economics from a theoretical point of view. This volume is part of a more complex project including another edited volume (Spatial Economics Volume II: Applications) collecting original papers which address Spatial Economics from an applied perspective.

Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice draws on the fields of geography, political theory, and cultural studies to analyze experiments with novel forms of democracy, highlighting the critical issue of the changing nature of the state and citizenship in the contemporary political landscape as they are buffeted by countervailing forces of corporate globalization and participatory politics.

Using interesting case studies, the book explores these 3 main themes:

• the meaning of radical democracy in light of recent developments in democratic theory
• new spatial arrangements or scales of democracy from local to global, from streets protests to the development of transnational networks
• the character and role of states in the development of new forms of democracy

The book asks and answers: are participatory models of democracy viable alternatives in their own right or are they best understood as supplemental to traditional representative democracy? What are the conditions that give rise to the development of such models and are they equally effective at every scale; i.e., do they only realize their radical potential in particular, local places?

A useful text in a broad range of advanced undergraduate courses including social movements, political sociology or geography, political philosophy.

This title was first published in 2003. This book focuses on the role of tangible and intangible networks that affect spatial interdependencies in economic and social life. It addresses the question - is the effect of distance disappearing? In examining this question the book considers the types of interaction that bring about globalisation of markets as well as social life in general and the distortion of distance patterns and changes in spatial interdependencies. The contributions elaborate theory and methods by examining hierarchical fields of internal and external influence on regional change; sources of productivity growth in a network of industries, endogenous growth and development policies. The book concludes with an assessment of plan evaluation methodologies for a changing and globalizing world characterized by new economic networks and networking arrangements.

Fierce competitiveness between established and emerging major cities, such as Berlin, London, Shanghai and Sydney, has led to a pressure to excel as desirable locations for business, cultural activities, highly skilled migrants and tourists. At the same time, the transformation of settled and new migrant communities creates complex urban borders and variegated representations (academic, cinematic, popular, official) of the city. While cities increasingly deploy cosmopolitan images portraying the diversity of past and present populations and activities, this continues to coexist with parochialism as a mood and mode of cultural formations and a reflection of local specificities. This volume brings together cultural analysts, social scientists, and media and film scholars to explore the ways in which core cities generate competing claims on, and visions of, their use and their future, and thus have engaged with the necessity to brand their image for international consumption and for internal coherence.

A Study on Globalizing Cities is the latest masterpiece by Zhou Zhenhua, a famous Chinese economist, who closely tracks the theoretical study of global cities and is actively engaged in the strategic research of Shanghai's development.With rich empirical data and an in-depth analysis, this book is of great theoretical and practical significance. Different from studies on global cities by renowned western scholars, this book extends its perspective to globalizing cities. It explores a unique development model for China's globalizing cities by adopting a creative angle of observation and analytical methods. By criticizing that the traditional global city theory derives the logic relations of global cities directly from globalization, Mr Zhou puts forward the concept of globalization city, which is introduced as a new intermediate explanatory variable. More importantly, this book emphasizes that the building of global cities is not only dependent on the distribution of urban space and urban economic development but also on comprehensive construction of multiple structures and functions of cities.

Since the mid-2000s, the harsh reality of call centre employment for a generation of young workers in Portugal has been impossible to ignore. With its endless rows of small cubicles, where human agents endure repetitive telephone conversations with abusive clients under invasive modes of technological surveillance, discipline and control, call centre work remains a striking symbol of labour precarity, a condition particularly associated with the neoliberal generational disenchantment that 'each generation does better than its predecessor'. This book describes the emergence of a regime of disciplined agency in the Portuguese call centre sector. Examining the ascendancy of call centres as icons of precarity in contemporary Portugal, this book argues that call centre labour constitutes a new form of commodification of the labouring subject. De Matos argues that call centres represent an advanced system of non-manual labour power exploitation, due to the underestimation of human creativity that lies at the centre of the regimented structures of call centre labour. Call centres can only guarantee profit maintenance, de Matos argues, through the commodification of the human agency arising from the operators' moral, relational and social embedded agentive linguistic interventions of creative improvisation, decision-making, problem-solving and ethical evaluation. -- .

What is a Global City? Who authorizes the World Class City? This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.

The purpose of this book is to provide a guided tour through the theoretical foundations of spatial locations of firms and industries in an evolutionary economic framework. It addresses the issues of how a location of business in geographical space is selected and where economic activity may (re)locate in the future. The analysis is in the context of technological progress, innovation, disequilibrium and endemic uncertainty. Jovanovic raises pertinent questions such as how willing, motivated and able firms (and governments) are to adapt to constantly evolving new opportunities and challenges over time and to experiment and translate these perceptions into profitable actions. How is their 'competitive position' evolving relative to others and changing over time when faced with a stream of constantly arriving new opportunities, threats and obstacles? Considerations are always supported with a plethora of examples and cases from real life. Jovanovic argues that the economy is a complex and constantly adaptive system which is almost always outside equilibrium. Building on this, he suggests that there is an important lacuna in our understanding of evolutionary spatial economics and that there is much space for further multidisciplinary research in this academic and practical area. This book offers an evolutionary and disequilibrium analysis of the subject and makes parallels, where appropriate and possible, among economics, geography, physics, biology and art. It considers key areas in theory, market and production structure, spatial location of domestic and foreign firms, as well as regional policy. In addition, there are references to policy intervention; importance of investment in local social stability, education and training; as well as to uncontrollable variables that are beyond the influence of firms, industries, regions or public authorities. The author offers various evolutionary insights and alternatives to the pure neoclassical equilibrium economic model.

What makes a great city? Why do people and businesses still value urban life and buildings over a quiet life in the suburbs or countryside? Now might seem a difficult time to make the case for social contact in urban areas - so why is face-to-face contact still considered crucial to many 21st-century economies? In a look back over a century's-worth of thinking about cities, business and office locations, this accessible book explains their ongoing importance as places that thrive on face-to-face meetings, and in negotiating uncertainty and 'sealing the deal'. Using interviews with business leaders and staff from knowledge-intensive, innovation-rich industries, it argues for the continuing value of the 'right' location despite the information revolution, the penetration of artificial intelligence (AI), and the COVID-19 pandemic. It also explores why digital systems have transformed businesses in cities and towns, but in fact have changed surprisingly little about the challenges of business life. This timely book gives readers, including developers, investors, policy-makers and students of planning or geography, essential tools for thinking about the future of places ranging from market towns to great World Cities.