Agents of casualization? The temporary staffing industry and labour market restructuring in Australia

This article presents a study of the Australian temporary staffingindustry. It explores how temporary staffing markets are manufacturedthrough the interactions between industrial relations and regulatorysystems, on the one hand, and the structures and strategiesof domestic and transnational temporary staffing agencies onthe other. The article draws on secondary datasets and semi-structuredinterviews with government departments, labour unions, staffingagencies and their trade bodies to analyse the size, structureand characteristics of the Australian temporary staffing market.It argues that the Australian market differs in important waysfrom those other ‘neoliberal’ labour market regimes—suchas those in Canada, UK and USA—with which it is oftencompared. The article argues for an approach that seeks to explorethe (often gradual) mutual transformation of temporary staffingorganizations and the institutional and regulatory systems inwhich they are embedded, rather than privileging one at theexpense of the other.     

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.     

Emerging Markets for Nature and Challenges for the Ecosystem Service Approach

Ecosystem services (ESS) are a burdened concept. They are supposed to function as a protective mechanism to make nature economically visible, while simultaneously contributing to economic development. At the core of the concept is the ideal of concisely valued and well‐accounted‐for goods traded in markets by rational and moral actors. This virtual idea is being challenged by real local processes of short‐term commodification and market‐based incentives for profit making in ‘messy’, unequal and illegitimate ESS markets. This article presents a local case‐study perspective focusing on the thatch grass ESS in the Kavango Regions of Namibia, where harvesters have become involved in an emerging capitalist value chain. It shows how, against the background of a post‐colonial political‐institutional setting that leaves plenty of leeway for exploitation, the real‐life conflation of market incentives and cash desires transforms local subsistence, causes a revaluation of ESS, and poses a real challenge to the virtual ESS conservation approach. Instead of viewing ESS as countable items involved in beneficial market interactions, we need to come to a more precise understanding of the consequences, local vulnerabilities and externalities of ESS marketizations.     

THE FOOD VALUE CHAIN AS A LOCUS FOR (DIS)AGREEMENT: CONVENTIONS AND QUALITIES IN THE SPANISH WINE AND NORWEGIAN SALTED COD INDUSTRIES

According to the theory of conventions, food value chains (FVCs) involve a complex array of actors who share an agreement about the qualities embodied in their particular foodstuff. Nevertheless, that agreement is continuously challenged by changes in consumer markets. Therefore, I argue that FVCs able to adapt those qualities to new trends will perform better than FVCs whose commitment to certain qualities leads to a misunderstanding between producers and consumers. The organization of the chain itself, the values of national regulatory frameworks, and the goals of the national innovation system are discussed as factors that shape an FVCs' ability to re‐arrange that core agreement. By using professional reports, statistical records and personal interviews, this article focuses on two FVCs that have experienced contrasting trajectories in recent decades in the Spanish market: the wine industry located in the region of Castile and Leon (Spain) and the Norwegian salted cod industry. The growing wine FVC has achieved a successful agreement about a set of qualities linked to nature, tradition, and place, all of them guaranteed by the reputation of the Designation of Origin (DO) system. In contrast, the salted cod FVC is losing its market share because its main actors are failing to properly communicate the key qualities of environmental sustainability and artisanal cod production to concerned Spanish consumers, as well as in the adoption of the place‐related attributes that still shape consumer preferences in Spain.     

Reflections on the Chinese State

This article examines critically the application of the developmental state concept to China. A conjuncture of specific political, socio‐economic and institutional processes, both internal and external, undermines the case for China as a developmental state. Against a back‐drop of intensifying global economic competition, intense rivalry between local economic actors for markets, resources and foreign investment not only produces contradictory developmental outcomes but also undermines the political and administrative capacity for fundamental social and economic transformation. The Chinese state is best understood as polymorphous, assuming multiple, complex forms and behaviours across time and space, and defying reduction to a unitary actor.     

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that have been referred to as the ‘financialization of commodities’, which we define as an increase in trading activity by financial investors and the reorientation of business strategies by commodity trading houses towards risk management and financial activities. This article assesses how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low‐income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and national market structures. It investigates how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging, in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on derivatives markets, local actors in producing countries face the challenge of increased short‐termism — albeit to different extents depending on national market structures — with limited access to risk management.     

Labour Regime Transformation in Myanmar: Constitutive Processes of Contestation

This article studies the case of a workers’ strike in Myanmar's ready‐made garment sector to illustrate how differently‐situated actors have engaged at multiple scales to influence emerging forms of labour regulation in the country. The analysis is drawn out through the historicization of domestic regulatory transformation. As a hegemonic project targeting industrial peace for purposes of capital accumulation, Myanmar's labour regime has been shaped by various actors outside of government circles, including International Labour Organization (ILO) personnel, Myanmar trade unionists, foreign governments, transnational corporations, domestic capitalists and Myanmar workers. Proposing a multi‐scalar reading of labour regime transformation attentive to constitutive processes of contestation, the study analyses ways in which varied, and at times unofficial, relations coalesce to shape labour regulation.     

国外人文地理学尺度政治理论研究进展

尺度政治理论产生于生产方式的变革与全球化的深入发展、新自由主义的兴起与治理方式的转型以及西方人文地理学的尺度转向等实践和理论背景中。其研究经历了由重点关注尺度的政治建构到重点关注行动者的话语和实践的转变。以此为基础,从结构-行为-行动者视角可以总结出尺度政治研究的三个方向:作为政治过程的尺度结构转变、跨尺度的政治行为与策略以及跨尺度的政治行动者联系网络。随后,本文回顾了当前研究中的三个案例以进一步阐明尺度政治理论的实践应用以及上述三个方向之间的区别与联系。最后,基于国内语境,本文从理论和实证两方面出发初步探讨了国内下一步研究应重点关注的问题。     

Innovation and the Entrepreneurial State in Asia: Mechanisms of Bond Market Development

Abstract

Bond markets have expanded rapidly in emerging East Asian economies in recent years. Asian policymakers have played a pivotal role in this development. This process presents an interesting challenge to the developmental state literature associated with bank-based financial systems. We argue that it is best to understand the role of the state as an entrepreneurial state in the construction of these markets, focusing on institutional innovation in three mechanisms of state-led market infrastructure: national or local credit rating agencies, mortgage corporations and bond pricing agencies. National credit rating agencies rate the creditworthiness of debt in local currency. Mortgage corporations create markets in securitised housing loans. Bond pricing agencies put a value on illiquid debt instruments to enable mark-to-market portfolio management. Together, these three mechanisms constitute the core determinants of the market (demand for creditworthy products, supply of tradeable assets, and the fixing of a price to those assets). In so doing they influence the nature of market operations, producing outcomes very different from the free market ideal type. We also consider cross-country commonalities and variations in this general pattern.     

Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia

Abstract: In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale perspective to the analysis of recent industrial relations legislation in Australia, I show that the nature and direction of rescaling is “fixed” by the powers of institutional actors and the scope of their jurisdictions. I then draw on the distinctively scaled relations of the Australian context to assess the extent to which Australia's national rescaling processes can be seen as representing a process of convergence toward universal “spaces of neoliberalism”.     

Multi‐Scalar Practices of the Korean State in Global Climate Politics: The Case of the Global Green Growth Institute

The paper examines the significance of state territoriality and the related multi‐scalar practices of the state in the light of the symptoms of post‐politics exemplified in global environmental governance. The focus rests on the South Korean government's Green Growth (GG) strategy and the efforts to export this strategy as a role model to emerging economies worldwide through the establishment of the Global Green Growth Institute. We begin with the question why the Korean government is going global with a political program that is heavily disputed at home. We then study the practices by which the state manages to maintain its territoriality under the conditions of global climate change. Lastly, we discuss how multi‐scalar practices of environmental governance in the GG strategy are applied by state and non‐state actors both in Korea and abroad.     

Introduction: Financialisation and Development in Asia under Late Capitalism

Abstract

Multilateral development agencies have increasingly focused attention on underdeveloped countries in Asia as potential new sites for financial capital. Often referred to as “emerging markets”, these economies are seen as ripe for private sector investment and, at the same time, in need of foreign capital to support rapid industrialisation, modernisation and poverty reduction. For development agencies, this confluence of interests suggests a means for quickly closing the “development gap”, primarily through mobilising techno-managerial modalities designed to reduce barriers to capital entry and other institutional inefficiencies seen as inimical to investment. Thus development agencies now encourage the construction of “enabling environments” to support “market driven development” through processes of “financialisation”. Development, in this sense, is no longer state-led or state-centred, but rather financially driven and privately procured.

As we highlight in this special issue, however, financialised modes of development are highly contested and problematic. Indeed, the diffusion into the underdeveloped world of essentially developed world financialisation agendas that seek to instil a broad-based market rationalism that downloads new costs and risks to populations is of significant concern. This Introduction sets in context and introduces a much needed set of articles that bring clarity to financialisation in developing Asia and its implications for development as a process of substantively improving material conditions.     

Politics,Society and Financial Liberalization: Turkey in the 1990s

This article focuses on the political economy of Turkey in the 1990s to illustrate the importance of analysing economic variables that intersect with the quality of political democracy. In 1989, the debt‐ridden state moved to systematically and completely deregulate Turkey’s financial markets. Together with the ongoing processes of liberalizing commodity markets and integrating with global capital markets, financial liberalization was expected to achieve fiscal and monetary stability, stimulate business confidence to invest in productive sectors, produce stable growth, encourage privatization and control inflation. However, the new hegemony of the capital markets has gone hand‐in‐hand with deteriorating macroeconomic performance, a worsening income distribution, the discrediting of politics and its isolation from society. The authors examine several key dynamics which are helping to legitimate the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s. These include the distribution of state largesse to manipulate electoral capitalism; the rise of an informal sector in the ‘Anatolian Tigers’; promotion of the seductive attractions of the market; and an antipolitical reform populism adopted by political actors to exploit popular disillusionment with the political system.     

Regulatory Cooperation in North America: Diplomacy Navigating Asymmetries

This article examines the processes, outcomes, and prospects for regulatory cooperation in North America based on the activity of the US–Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council. It explores regulatory cooperation as a series of two-level games embedded within broader multilevel governance processes of participating countries. It examines political, economic, and bureaucratic factors contributing to the development and evolution of cross-border and broader international regulatory cooperation and the practical limits of centralized political and regulatory oversight in these processes. Major requirements for success include shared or substantially overlapping national objectives (including those of relevant regulatory agencies), complementary coalitions of domestic interests in each country, and regulators’ capacity to work with (or around) potential veto holders within domestic institutions. Regulatory changes are often filtered and mitigated through national processes of bureaucratic politics and related institutional dynamics. In practice, effective regulatory cooperation depends on regulators’ perspectives of the national interest.     

Providing Intergenerational Goods: Implementation of National Park System Plans in Canada and the United States

The provision of inter generational goods is a challenging task for democratic governments in that benefits arrive in the future but costs are borne in the present. Public agencies usually are assigned responsibility for providing such goods, but implementation of their long-term plans often is constrained by the short-term focus of other political actors. This argument is illustrated through a comparison of Canadian and American efforts to expand national park systems according to scientific criteria. Efforts in both nations have been constrained, albeit by different sets of institutional actors. The strong federal structure in Canada has enabled subnational actors to slow and compromise agency expansion plans. American agency efforts have been constrained by the acts of individual politicians at the federal level, particularly members of Congress     

Does Institutional Location Protect from Political Influence? The Case of a Minimum Labour Standards Enforcement Agency in Australia

Among the many factors that influence enforcement agencies, this article examines the role of the institutional location (and independence) of agencies, and an incumbent government's ideology. It is argued that institutional location affects the level of political influence on the agency's operations, while government ideology affects its willingness to resource enforcement agencies and approve regulatory activities. Evidence from the agency regulating minimum labour standards in the Australian federal industrial relations jurisdiction (currently the Fair Work Ombudsman) highlights two divergences from the regulatory enforcement literature generally. First, notions of independence from political interference offered by institutional location are more illusory than real and, second, political need motivates political action to a greater extent than political ideology.     

Scales and networks of neoliberal climate governance: the regulatory and territorial logics of European Union emissions trading

The growing influence of neoliberal approaches to environmental governance has significantly increased the involvement of industry non-state actors in international and national climate governance. However, the implications of this neoliberalisation and hybridisation of climate governance, and particularly state–industry relations during these processes, remain under-integrated with wider geographical debates on the scalar and network politics of environmental governance. In this paper, we probe these issues by examining the regulatory and territorial logics underpinning the negotiation and implementation of the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). We argue that overlapping interpretations of the regulatory logic of emissions trading (as a cost-effective means of meeting climate objectives) by EU, state and industry actors provided the driving force for the creation of a Europeanised climate governance space and the consolidation of the EU's governing authority in respect of the formal rule-making elements of the EU ETS. However, alliances between state and industry actors, based around intersecting interpretations of their territorial interests in relation to emissions trading, strongly influenced the scheme's design. Moreover, speculative behaviour within the EU ETS market indicates the continued ability of market networks to disrupt territorially-based climate governance regimes. We argue that critical exploration of the territorial logics and practices of EU emissions trading from regime creation to operation provides new insights into the emerging spatial politics of neoliberal environmental governance and its implications for climate protection.     

Impacts of Market Liberalization on Regulatory Network: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Swiss Telecommunications Sector

This article looks at the reconfiguration of the regulatory actors' network, as induced by the liberalization and reregulation processes in utility sectors. It investigates the changes in governance structures and patterns of collaborative ties between actors resulting from these processes. Applying stochastic actor‐oriented modeling (SAOM) to data on the liberalization of the Swiss telecommunications sector over two decades, we test whether and to what extent structural changes driven by liberalization and reregulation express themselves through network effects, that is, through changing patterns of interactions between political authorities, regulators, regulatees, and interest groups. Our empirical tests highlight a rearrangement of the regulatory network and a reorganization of relational patterns around new actors, such as the sector‐specific regulatory agency, coregulators, and new operators.