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The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as geographically differentiated phenomena. Staged from the field of economic geography, the book seeks to build bridges to complementary developments in critical political economy and heterodox economic studies by way of a substantive theoretical and methodological program. Jamie Peck advances a series of arguments concerning the inherent-and highly consequential-spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, engaging a range of issues from the diversity of capitalism(s) to the dynamics of late-stage neoliberalization, and from the problematic uneven geographical development to the challenges-cum-opportunities of conjunctural methodologies.
Confronted with a declining jobs base, deepening social problems and apparent indifference on the part of central government, many British cities made an 'entrepreneurial turn' during the last two decades. Few did so in quite such a dramatic way as Manchester: once a bastion of municipal socialism, the city has enthusiastically embraced the new economy of high-level services, comspicuous cultural consumption and aggressive self-promotion. City of revolution provides a comprehensive, reflective and critical analysis of this far-reaching process of urban transformation, searching beneath the hype to expose the true character of the 'new Manchester'. Has Manchester engineered an urban renaissance, having finally turned its back on the grimy factory economy? Or is it on a slow-motion slide into the post-industrial sludge of economic insecurity and social polarisation? Drawing on the work of leading researchers and commentators in the field, this collection provides answers to these and other questions concerning Manchester's changing political economy. It makes compelling reading for all those with an interest in the future of Britain's cities.
Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a
potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has
dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated
with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with
the "Washington consensus" on international development policy and
the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to
mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new
markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan or buzzword as
shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know
about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the
neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label?
Doreen Massey (1944-2016) changed geography. Her ideas on space, region, labour, identity, ethics and capital transformed the field itself, while also attracting a wide audience in sociology, planning, political economy, cultural studies, gender studies and beyond. The significance of her contributions is difficult to overstate. Far from a dry defence of disciplinary turf, her claim that "geography matters" possessed both scholarly substance and political salience. Through her most influential concepts - such as power-geometries and a "global sense of place" - she insisted on the active role of regions and places not simply in bearing the brunt of political-economic restructuring, but in reshaping the uneven geographies of global capitalism and the horizons of politics. In capturing how global forces articulated with the particularities of place, Massey's work, right up until her death, was an inspiration for critical social sciences and political activists alike. It integrated theory and politics in the service of challenging and transforming both. This collection of Massey's writings brings together for the first time the full span of her formative contributions, showcasing the continuing relevance of her ideas to current debates on globalization, immigration, nationalism and neoliberalism, among other topics. With introductions from the editors, the collection represents an unrivalled distillation of the range and depth of Massey's thinking. It is sure to remain an essential touchstone for social theory and critical geography for generations to come.
Doreen Massey was a creative scholar, inspiring teacher and restless activist. Her path-breaking thinking about space, place, politics and economy changed not only geography but the critical social sciences, initiating new ways of seeing, understanding and indeed transforming the world. This collection of commissioned essays, including from Doreen Massey's long-time interlocutors and collaborators, explores both the generative sources and the continuing potential of her remarkably wide-ranging and influential body of work. It provides an unparalleled assessment of the political and social context that gave rise to many of Massey's key ideas and contributions - such as spatial divisions of labour, power-geometries and the global sense of place - and how they subsequently travelled, and were translated and transformed, both within and outside of academia. Looking forward, rather than merely backward, the collection also highlights the many ways in which Massey's formulations and frameworks provide a basis for new interventions in contemporary debates over immigration, financialization, macroeconomic crises, political engagement beyond academia, and more. Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues is a testament to the continuing relevance of Doreen Massey's work across a wide range of fields, serving as an invaluable companion to the new collection of Massey's own writings, The Doreen Massey Reader published simultaneously and also compiled by the editors.
Doreen Massey was a creative scholar, inspiring teacher and restless activist. Her path-breaking thinking about space, place, politics and economy changed not only geography but the critical social sciences, initiating new ways of seeing, understanding and indeed transforming the world. This collection of commissioned essays, including from Doreen Massey's long-time interlocutors and collaborators, explores both the generative sources and the continuing potential of her remarkably wide-ranging and influential body of work. It provides an unparalleled assessment of the political and social context that gave rise to many of Massey's key ideas and contributions - such as spatial divisions of labour, power-geometries and the global sense of place - and how they subsequently travelled, and were translated and transformed, both within and outside of academia. Looking forward, rather than merely backward, the collection also highlights the many ways in which Massey's formulations and frameworks provide a basis for new interventions in contemporary debates over immigration, financialization, macroeconomic crises, political engagement beyond academia, and more. Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues is a testament to the continuing relevance of Doreen Massey's work across a wide range of fields, serving as an invaluable companion to the new collection of Massey's own writings, The Doreen Massey Reader published simultaneously and also compiled by the editors.
Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate.
The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as geographically differentiated phenomena. Staged from the field of economic geography, the book seeks to build bridges to complementary developments in critical political economy and heterodox economic studies by way of a substantive theoretical and methodological program. Jamie Peck advances a series of arguments concerning the inherent-and highly consequential-spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, engaging a range of issues from the diversity of capitalism(s) to the dynamics of late-stage neoliberalization, and from the problematic uneven geographical development to the challenges-cum-opportunities of conjunctural methodologies.
The term "market" originally portrayed a public space for economic transactions but the term has since evolved into an abstract and disputed idea. Despite modern markets seemingly omnipresent nature, their specific geographies have undergone relatively little analysis. This collection of new essays rediscovers the physical space that markets inhabit and explore how the impact of political, social and economic factors determine the shape of a particular market space. The essays present new research from the fields of geography, economics, political economy and planning and provide valuable case study material to show how markets are contested, constructed and placed. Rather than separate markets from the surrounding society and state, these essays connect markets to their wider context and showcase how economic geography can combine with other disciplines to throw new light on spaces of exchange.
We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially "ideas that work," are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of this phenomenon, one that compares processes of policy development across two rapidly moving fields that emerged in the Global South and have quickly been adopted worldwide conditional cash transfers (a social policy program that conditions payments on behavioral compliance) and participatory budgeting (a form of citizen-centric urban governance). Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore critically analyze the growing transnational connectivity between policymaking arenas and modes of policy development, assessing the implications of these developments for contemporary policymaking. Emphasizing that policy models do not simply travel intact from sites of invention to sites of emulation, they problematize fast policy as a phenomenon that is real and consequential yet prone to misrepresentation. Based on fieldwork conducted across six continents and in fifteen countries, Fast Policy is an essential resource in providing an extended theoretical discussion of policy mobility and in presenting a methodology for ethnographic research on global social policy.
At a time of intense theoretical debates in urban studies, the research practices underlying such theories have not received the same attention. This original and creative text interrogates the methodological underpinnings of contemporary urban scholarship, with reference to different global sites and situations, as well as to recent debates around postcolonial, planetary, and provincialized urban theories. Rather than reducing methodological questions to a matter of tools and techniques, it unearths the complex connections between theory, research design, empirical work, expositional style, and normative-ethical commitments. Innovatively co-produced by faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, Urban Studies Inside-Out it is comprised of three parts. Part I: An introduction to the field of urban studies and its changing theories, methodological norms and practices. Part II: Features a collection of methodological essays co-authored by graduate students, deconstructing the research designs, the methodological practices, and the modes of presentation and representation across recent urban monographs. Part III: Consists of informative keyword primers which explicate the key concepts and formulations in the field of urban studies. This volume offers a welcome intervention within urban studies, and stands to make a valuable contribution for graduate students and researchers.
Offshore outsourcing-the movement of jobs to lower-wage countries-is one of the defining features of globalization. Routine blue-collar work has been going offshore for decades, but the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s extended this process to many parts of the service economy too. Politically controversial from the beginning, "offshoring" is conventionally seen as a threat to jobs, wages, and economic security in higher-income countries-having become synonymous with the dirty work of globalization. Even though the majority of corporations make some use of offshore outsourcing, fearful of negative publicity most now choose to manage these activities in a discreet manner. Partly as a result, the global sourcing business, now reckoned to be worth more $120 billion, largely operates under the radar, its ocean-spanning activities in low-cost labour arbitrage being poorly documented and poorly understood. Offshore is the first sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing industry, its business practices, its market dynamics, its technologies, and its politics. The book traces the complex transformation of the worlds of global sourcing, from its origins in the new international division of labour in the 1970s, through the rapid growth of back-office economies in India and the Philippines since the 1990s, to the development of "nearshore" markets in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Recently, this evolving process of geographical and organizational restructuring has included experiments in "backshoring" within low-cost, ex-urban locations in the United States and a wave of software-enabled automation, which threatens to remove labour from many back offices altogether. In these and other ways, the offshore revolution continues.
Doreen Massey (1944-2016) changed geography. Her ideas on space, region, labour, identity, ethics and capital transformed the field itself, while also attracting a wide audience in sociology, planning, political economy, cultural studies, gender studies and beyond. The significance of her contributions is difficult to overstate. Far from a dry defence of disciplinary turf, her claim that "geography matters" possessed both scholarly substance and political salience. Through her most influential concepts - such as power-geometries and a "global sense of place" - she insisted on the active role of regions and places not simply in bearing the brunt of political-economic restructuring, but in reshaping the uneven geographies of global capitalism and the horizons of politics. In capturing how global forces articulated with the particularities of place, Massey's work, right up until her death, was an inspiration for critical social sciences and political activists alike. It integrated theory and politics in the service of challenging and transforming both. This collection of Massey's writings brings together for the first time the full span of her formative contributions, showcasing the continuing relevance of her ideas to current debates on globalization, immigration, nationalism and neoliberalism, among other topics. With introductions from the editors, the collection represents an unrivalled distillation of the range and depth of Massey's thinking. It is sure to remain an essential touchstone for social theory and critical geography for generations to come.
Every night before Oscar Potter went to bed, he would sit in a large, overstuffed chair in front of his fireplace, warm his old bones, and sip on some potato soup. He lived in a large, dismal house that remained silent except for the sound of the clocks ticking and the metal tip of Oscar's Irish black Hawthorne cane tap, tap, tapping as he walked along the cold marble floors. Oscar was a grouchy old man-a real sourpuss-who lived as lonesome as an oyster. Once, the house had been filled with joy and the sounds of children laughing as they played throughout the hallways. Now, it seemed that joy had taken an eternal nap, and the only constant throughout the house were the dark shadows. One dark and stormy winter's night, as Oscar sat in silence eating his soup, a small mouse named Newton appeared beside him. As the mouse asked for a speck of food, a faint knocking suddenly came from the front door...
At a time of intense theoretical debates in urban studies, the research practices underlying such theories have not received the same attention. This original and creative text interrogates the methodological underpinnings of contemporary urban scholarship, with reference to different global sites and situations, as well as to recent debates around postcolonial, planetary, and provincialized urban theories. Rather than reducing methodological questions to a matter of tools and techniques, it unearths the complex connections between theory, research design, empirical work, expositional style, and normative-ethical commitments. Innovatively co-produced by faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, Urban Studies Inside-Out it is comprised of three parts. Part I: An introduction to the field of urban studies and its changing theories, methodological norms and practices. Part II: Features a collection of methodological essays co-authored by graduate students, deconstructing the research designs, the methodological practices, and the modes of presentation and representation across recent urban monographs. Part III: Consists of informative keyword primers which explicate the key concepts and formulations in the field of urban studies. This volume offers a welcome intervention within urban studies, and stands to make a valuable contribution for graduate students and researchers.
Offshore outsourcing- the movement of jobs to lower-wage countries- is one of the defining features of globalization. Routine blue-collar work has been going offshore for decades, but the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s extended this process to many parts of the service economy too. Politically controversial from the beginning, "offshoring" is conventionally seen as a threat to jobs, wages, and economic security in higher-income countries, having become synonymous with the dirty work of globalization. Even though the majority of corporations make some use of offshore outsourcing, fearful of negative publicity most now choose to manage these activities in a discreet manner. Partly as a result, the global sourcing business, reckoned to be worth more than $120 billion, largely operates under the radar, its ocean-spanning activities in low-cost labour arbitrage being poorly documented and poorly understood. Offshore is the first sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing industry, its business practices, its market dynamics, its technologies, and its politics. The book traces the complex transformation of the worlds of global sourcing, from its origins in the new international division of labour in the 1970s, through the rapid growth of back-office economies in India and the Philippines since the 1990s, to the development of "nearshore" markets in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Recently, this evolving process of geographical and organizational restructuring has included experiments in "backshoring" within low-cost, ex-urban locations in the United States and a wave of software-enabled automation, which threatens to remove labour from many back offices altogether. In these and other ways, the offshore revolution continues.
"The biggest strength of the book is its pedagogic design, which will appeal to new entrants in the field but also leaves space for methodological debates... It is well suited for use on general courses but it also involves far more than an introduction and is full of theoretical insights for a more theoretically advanced audience." - Economic Geography Research Group In the last fifteen years economic geography has experienced a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological shifts. Politics and Practice in Economic Geography explains and interrogates these fundamental issues of research practice in the discipline. Concerned with examining the methodological challenges associated with that 'cultural turn', the text explains and discusses: qualitative and ethnographic methodologies the role and significance of quantitative and numerical methods the methodological implications of both post-structural and feminist theories the use of case-study approaches the methodological relation between the economic geography and neoclassical economics, economic sociology, and economic anthropology. Leading contributors examine substantive methodological issues in economic geography and make a distinctive contribution to economic-geographical debate and practice.
Challenging the prevailing idea that labor markets are governed by universal economic processes, this significant work argues instead that labor markets develop in tandem with social and political institutions, and thus function in locally specific ways. Focusing on the complex social processes that lie at the heart of the labor market--those of labor control, labor reproduction, and labor regulation--the author develops an innovative political economy approach that is sensitive to the ways these processes are locally constituted. He also demonstrates how the geographically uneven development of labor markets is currently associated with a deterioration of working conditions, the trading away of workers' rights and benefits, and a downward spiral in labor standards. Drawing on a critical reading of segmentation and regulation theory, which calls for a simultaneous analysis of economic processes and social institutions, the first part of the book establishes a theoretical case for spatializing labor market theory. The author shows how labor market processes are transformed by the way they operate through space and in place, drawing attention to systemic spatial variability in their structures, dynamics, and modes of social regulation. Presenting illuminating empirical case studies, the second part of the book illustrates some of the ways in which the author's approach to labor market theory can be put to work. Chapters take an in-depth look at skill formation in the context of labor market flexibility, industrial homework and labor market restructuring, workfarist tendencies in labor regulation, and neoliberalism and the geographic reconstitution of labor relations.
Academic publisher, Pion, has an outstanding reputation for publishing high quality journals in the fields of geography, physics and experimental psychology. The four geographical journals in the Pion stable - the Environment and Planning series - are committed to publishing innovative, interdisciplinary quality papers which tackle a range of important questions. This collection, edited by a stellar editorial team under the leadership of Stuart Elden and published by SAGE, draws from all four journals to showcase the best of the best on offer in urban and regional research. Volume One: Cities and Regions provides a selection of papers from the original journal in the series, focused on the opportunities and challenges associated with urban and regional transformations around the world. The wide-ranging remit of the journal allows readers to draw on sources from many disciplines - geography, sociology, economics, environmental science, political science, planning, and regional studies. Volume Two: Planning and Design brings together seminal articles that promote research relating to spatial problems and plans concerning the built environment and the spatial structure of cities and regions. It brings an avowedly interdisciplinary approach to urban design, planning, modeling, simulation, GIS and spatial analysis, focusing on new scientific and computational approaches. Volume Three: Government and Policy presents the path-breaking papers that have been at the forefront of research on government, governance, and innovations in public policy. The journal encourages international perspectives and dialogue as illustrated by the varied selection in this volume. Volume Four: Society and Space brings together papers from the pre-eminent journal for interdisciplinary debates around society and space involving, among others, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and political scientists. It includes articles that exemplify the discussion of the mutually constitutive relation between the social and the spatial. Volume Five: Foundations, edited by the whole team, rounds off the collection with a selection of articles that eloquently demonstrate the theoretically sophisticated and practically relevant focus of this remarkable family of journals.
This book examines the political economy of workfare, the umbrella term for welfare-to-work initiatives that have been steadily gaining ground since candidate Bill Clinton's 1992 promise to end welfare as we know it. Peck traces the development, diffusion, and implementation of workfare policies in the United States, and their export to Canada and the United Kingdom. He explores how reforms have been shaped by labor markets and political conditions, how gender and race come into play, and how local programs fit into the broader context of neoliberal economics and globalization. The book cogently demonstrates that workfare rarely involves large-scale job creation, but is more concerned with deterring welfare claims and necessitating the acceptance of low-paying, unstable jobs. Integrating labor market theory, critical policy analysis, and extensive field research, Peck exposes the limitations of workfare policies and points toward more equitable alternatives.
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