Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants' own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.     

The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production

A range of recent debates in geography have considered responsibility and/or critical practice, including the connections between knowledge production, ethics and politics. Taking our cue from these debates, this paper explores the question and limits of responsibility in research across a global North–South divide. Emerging from reflections on our own research projects, we interrogate a central challenge of postcolonial knowledge production by examining two limits to, and constraints upon, responsible knowledge production across the global North–South: abstraction and representation, and learning. First, we argue that the forms of distancing that can inhere in abstraction risk sidestepping the concerns of 'the field' by decontextualising places/constituencies/ideas. This involves considering the representational economies at stake in negotiating slippages of distance or practices of learning. We argue in favour of creative and generative representations that might be produced through more participatory and uncertain practices. Second, we explore an ethical and indirect conception of learning as a basis for alternative modes of engagement with communities and researchers in research practice. In making this argument, we do not offer a kind of formula for responsibility in research nor do we argue simply for research to be more 'relevant'. Instead, and alert to our own positions of privilege, we seek to draw attention to these two limits to responsible praxis in the academic knowledge production process precisely because they can act as important registers for thinking through the politics of conducting research between different and sometimes co-constituting cultures of knowledge production.     

Women,skills and divisions of labour in the Scottish electronics industry

This paper describes the skill and gender structure of the Scottish electronics industry. Scottish electronics had proportionally fewer high‐skill employees and more female employees than British electronics. Female electronics workers in Scotland experienced greater occupational segregation than did females in Britain. Across the various electronics subsectors, the level of skills and the degree of feminization varied widely. Scottish electronics subsectors were not segregated into overlapping skill and gender divisions of labour. With few exceptions, increasing relative feminization of Scottish electronics subsectors was related to employment expansion; decreasing relative feminization to employment decline.     

The politics of privatisation: The case of the coffee industry corporation in Papua New Guinea

Since the 1970s there has been a continuing international drive to transform state institutions in a wide range of countries. The reforming drive continues to be associated with the idea of privatisation. The privatisation of the long‐established statutory corporation, the Coffee Industry Board (CIB), in Papua New Guinea (PNG), provides an opportunity to examine forces behind one expression of the demands for reform. The examination shows that while the demands were expressed as embodying a general interest, in this case that of ‘the coffee industry’, the campaign for privatisation was driven by the concerns of the largest exporting firms. While the effectiveness of the campaign depended upon capturing an international and domestic mood for reform, the specific target of the drive was the post‐independence changes in the practices of the Coffee Industry Board. In particular, the allocation of an increasing number of licences and export quota to new firms at the expense of long‐established trading firms threatened these enterprises’ revenues and profitability.     

In the front line: women,work and new spaces of labour politics in Poland

Pessimistic accounts of women's lives in post-communist Poland view women as powerless and passive victims of the transformation process. In contrast, this article argues that while political change and the restructuring of the economy have closed down some spaces of articulation and organisation, others have opened up. The article focuses on the way in which women in their spheres of work are shaping and actively resisting change through new organisations and individual and collective actions, which are in some ways a break with the past, but in other ways build on previous forms of activity. The work draws on qualitative research conducted over the last decade across Poland. This has coupled extensive interviews with women workers, national and regional trade union leaders, activists and feminists in a number of major Polish cities with reviews of Polish media and policy. We examine the economic and ideological context in which these new articulations are taking place, against the background of Poland's post-war communism and the rise of opposition movements. We look at the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the implications for women within the labour market and in their domestic lives. In particular, we examine initiatives from below in workplace organisation, by focusing on new unions and new actions in the public sector, and the beginnings of organisation in the new areas of the economy such as supermarkets. Finally, we look at how women are articulating their interests beyond formal workplaces. We conclude that we should be optimistic about these new spaces of activism. While some are well established, others are embryonic but provide a strong foundation on which women can increase their participation in spaces that promote their varied interests.     

Making labour mobile: Borders,precarity, and the competitive state in Finnish migration politics

This article explores how the multiplication of labour migration categories relies upon strategic territorialisations of borders to differentiate between workers' nationalities, worksites, and skills in Finland. We argue that for certain categories of workers, migration policies encourage workers to become mobile in ways that make them more precarious. We analyse worksites that show the different ways that labour is made mobile: the internationalization of higher education; Finnair's labour outsourcing and offshoring practices; and the recruitment of forest berry-pickers from Thailand. We first trace contentious migration politics in Finland, revealing conflicts over labour protections, universal labour rights, the state's obligations to create employment, economic competitiveness, national identity, and the precarisation of work. We show how practices of legal, procedural, and spatial differentiation particularise the conditions of work and argue that, even for skilled workers, the strategic territorialisation of borders works to differentiate between workers and work sites. This differentiation works to make labour mobile in multiple ways and, due to the selective territorialisation of labour protections, the political geographies of migration in Finland tend towards the precarisation of labour for skilled and unskilled workers alike.     

The Role of Female Labour in Industrial Restructuring: New production processes and labour market relations in the Istanbul clothing industry

For many industries, a new production system characterised principally by flexibility has become one of the key means of achieving competitive advantage in world markets. In traditional industrial sectors flexibility in the organisation of production is based upon subcontracting, within which female labour is of undisputed importance. In this article, research on female labour in the Istanbul clothing industry is used to investigate these processes of industrial restructuring. Particular attention is drawn to changes in women's attitude to work and in their responses to working conditions, which have important consequences for the industry itself.     

Situationally Sherpa: race,ethnicity, and the labour geography of the Everest industry

Following Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, western mythmaking transformed Sherpa ethnicity into a signifier for a labour category, a place, and a set of cultural characteristics. Westerners have come to link Sherpa-ness with stereotypes of superhuman strength, mountain skill, and loyalty. However, most labourers in the Everest industry are not Sherpas; they are upland ethnic minorities who migrate seasonally from the lower hills to the high Khumbu. Many of these ethnic minority labourers also pass as Sherpa. Becoming “situationally Sherpa” is a common practice, but little is known about how, why, and with what effects claims to Sherpa-ness are formed and deployed. This paper explores how and why this identity practice emerged alongside new labour geographies in the Everest region. The case of “situational Sherpas” reveals how racial, ethnic, and labour hierarchies intersect and blur to produce new experiences of oppression, and new possibilities for resistance.     

Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK-US comparison of retailers' ethical trading initiatives

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sitesof production, has become a key means through which labour inretailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, thereis evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedlyin their approaches to ethical trade and that such variationis shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts inwhich retailers are based. This article explores this insightby evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholderinitiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK'score multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative(ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takesa developmental and continuous learning approach to ethicaltrade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed moreon corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusivelyin the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attemptsto foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives,though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutionalcontexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches arefluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governanceof global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibilityby emphasising the political significance of national-institutionalenvironments. However, in line with notions of relational economicgeography, we understand these national-institutional environmentsas active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitionalways in which nationally based organisations evolve in theirhome countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendasfor ethical trade.     

The politics of the diarist

Peter Howson, The Life of Politics: The Howson Diaries, ed. Don Aitkin, Melbourne, The Viking Press, pp. 1013. $39.95     

Gaming on the edge: Mobile labour and global talent in Atlantic Canada's video game industry

Diminishing returns and advances in telecommunications have prompted large video game firms to seek new locations, outsource production, and develop niche studios, including on Canada's East Coast. In this paper, we examine emerging occupational cultures and trace the origins and evolution of video game production in Canada's Atlantic provinces—a critical yet peripheral space economy in the gaming sector. Our findings are drawn from 30 interviews with gameworkers, studio managers, government officials, and other industry experts. We find this industry to be driven by the confluence of three major factors: (i) provincial governments have supported video game development as a strategic industry via financial incentives; (ii) firms are benefiting from a return migration effect and are repatriating Atlantic Canadian talent from media hubs by selling “home,” work‐life balance, and an alternative to the punishing gamework culture associated with Silicon Valley; and (iii) post‐secondary institutions in the region have improved their talent pipelines through computer science, digital media, and video game development programs.     

Scientific research and corporate influence: smoking, mental illness, and the tobacco industry

Mentally ill individuals have always smoked at high rates and continue to do so, despite public health efforts to encourage smoking cessation. In the last half century, the tobacco industry became interested in this connection, and conducted and supported psychiatric and basic science research on the mental health implications of smoking, long before most mental health professionals outside the industry investigated this issue. Initially, representatives of tobacco industry research organizations supported genetics and psychosomatic research to try to disprove findings that smoking causes lung cancer. Tobacco industry research leaders engaged with investigators because of shared priorities and interests in the brain effects of nicotine. By the 1980s, collaborative funding programs and individual company research and development teams engaged in intramural and extramural basic science studies on the neuropharmacology of nicotine. When mental health researchers outside the industry became interested in the issue of the mentally ill and smoking in the mid-1990s, they increasingly explained it in terms of a disease of nicotine addiction. Both the idea that smoking/nicotine does something positive for the mentally ill and the conclusion that it is the result of nicotine dependence have the potential to support corporate agendas (tobacco or pharmaceutical).     

Human capital, cluster formation, and international relocation: the case of the garment industry in Japan, 1968-98

This article examines the changing roles of human capital inthe process of the formation of industrial clusters, changesin marketing channels, and the relocation of the industrialbase to less developed areas and abroad, based on a case studyof a garment cluster in postwar Japan. We found, among otherthings, that experience as local traders played a major rolein the cluster formation. However, formal schooling assumesgreater importance in later stages, when direct transactionswith large customers replaced transactions with local merchants,and the international relocation of the production base becamea major management issue.     

The theatre of social change: nobility,opera industry and the politics of culture in Bologna between papal privileges and liberal principles

In Bologna, after Rome the second biggest city of the Papal States, the Teatro Comunale played a major role in the city's cultural self-representation from the eighteenth century. After the Unification of Italy local politicians and the rising middle class used the theatre - together with the famous university, the Liceo musicale and the Pinacoteca - to present Bologna as one of the young nation-state's cultural capitals. A study of Bologna's opera house as a social institution highlights social, cultural and political processes and conflicts which marked the transition from the papal regime to the liberal nation-state. Bologna's nobility, which owned the theatre's prestigious private boxes, opposed the idea of democratically elected politicians and professional experts determining the fate of their theatre, the theatre which for centuries had provided the preferred backdrop for staging their social status.     

Reconceptualising local labour markets in the context of cross-border and transnational labour flows: The Irish example

The increased prevalence of border-crossing labour of various types makes an uneasy juxtaposition of the ‘local’ and the ‘transnational’ or the ‘global’ and raises two classes of questions. These concern, firstly, the definition of the local in local labour markets and, secondly, the role of state borders in regulating and shaping flows of border-crossing workers. The paper begins to explore these issues. It questions the conceptualisation and definition of local labour markets and outlines a case for transnational labour and state borders to be included in their theorisation. Following this, drawing on studies of recruitment and interviews with labour market actors on both sides of the Irish border it discusses how state borders impact on different types of labour in different circumstances and outlines the paradoxical and sometimes contradictory nature of state borders in labour regulation and employers' strategies. It concludes by arguing that state borders might be moved from the edge of local labour market studies to a place much nearer their centre.