Unfree Again: Social Reproduction,Flexible Labour Markets and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UK

Abstract: The reproduction of human insecurity in contemporary capitalist societies is linked to the need to “produce” labour at a price that permits the realisation of surplus value, and crises of social reproduction (both generalised and specific). In this paper I use a social reproduction lens to focus on the example of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK. I look first at the gang labour system, its evolution, and processes and institutions of regulation. The paper then examines the ways in which the gang labour system sheds light on interrelationship of relations of production and reproduction, processes of class formation, and how the power of supermarkets and the political imperative to keep food costs down, which are related to patterns of migration and racialisation, privilege the reproduction of some workers over others. This in turn signals the need to engage with the role and significance of unfree labour in contemporary economies.     

Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno-politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case

Abstract:  The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate political and policy responses is the sensitive issue of "ethnic balance", a troubled "legacy" of Latvian history. This has been characterised as comprising a "regime of discrimination" against the Russian-speaking minority. In the context of changes in the global migratory landscape, the potential for a renewed of regime of discrimination is emerging, based on an ethno-politics that has wider European resonance.     

毕达哥拉斯:从人到神的演变——“古史层累”现象的西方个案探究

顾颉刚创立的“古史层累说”理论具有普遍适用性,不仅适用于中国古史研究,也适用于其他地区古代史的研究。本文以“古史层累说”的理论为指导,分析毕达哥拉斯从人到神的演变过程以及导致这种现象产生的背后原因,进而通过这个具体个案的研究,来论证顾颉刚“古史层累说”理论所具有的普遍意义。     

A Crisis of Opportunity: Market-Making,Big Data,and the Consolidation of Migration as Risk

Crisis narratives surrounding Europe’s 2015 migration influx fuelled demands for new ways of tracking, mapping and predicting human mobility. We explore how market opportunities for technology firms and data analytics start-ups created by the EU’s Global Approach to Migration led to solutionistic approaches to compiling and analysing migration statistics. We show that initiatives such as the rebranding of existing platforms and services as migration prediction systems are consolidating policy conceptualisations of migration as risk. Despite the promise of greater granularity, this “big data approach” cannot offer greater certainty about who is on the move and why. Instead such approaches are ill-suited to understanding the complex dynamics of migration and to offering protection to vulnerable people. The marketisation of migration statistics through big data offers a key case for advancing progressive approaches to both migration statistics and global data justice.     

A Spectacular Eco‐Tour around the Historic Bloc: Theorising the Convergence of Biodiversity Conservation and Capitalist Expansion

Abstract: The simultaneous proliferation of protected areas for biodiversity conservation and neoliberal market expansion has sparked a growing body of work, which suggests that these are mutually reinforcing processes that reflect alliances between conservationist and capitalist agendas. Because this alliance is so counter intuitive to the ways in which biodiversity conservation is popularly understood, theoretical perspectives concerning these relationships have been slow in emerging. Drawing from Gramsci's ideas of hegemony and historic bloc, we propose a theoretical framework systematically to inform understandings and investigations of these transformations. We suggest that they are driven by the convergence of networks of interests, which work to resolve the apparent contradictions between demands for continued economic growth and growing concerns about what it portends for the future of our planet. These in turn rely on spectacular presentations of conservation interventions, conservation success stories, and their putative linkages to ecosystems and the global economy.     

Witness Intimidation, Forced Migration and Resettlement: A British Case Study

Situated within the context of geographical research on forced migration, this paper focuses on the experiences of prosecution witnesses who have had to flee their homes because of life-threatening intimidation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with witnesses, it examines the nature of the threat they were under, their decision to leave home, their life in temporary accommodation and their experiences of permanent resettlement away from the danger area. The paper highlights the impact of intimidation and forced migration on witnesses' personal geographies and, in particular, their sense of ontological security and self-identity.     

The road from serfdom: economic storytelling and narratives of India in the rise of neoliberalism

Abstract

Studies of neoliberalism’s rise in the second half of the twentieth century have focused on influential US and European thinkers and global economic institutions. They rarely mention India. This article argues that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nehru’s India served as both a central laboratory and a discursive field for international economists debating the proper role of the state in economic development. US economists like John Kenneth Galbraith held up India planning as a proxy for the ‘American way’ of capitalism in Asia; neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and B.R. Shenoy excoriated Nehru’s ‘road to socialism.’ As India’s economy stumbled in the late 1960s, neoliberal economists used Indian foundations to build an empirical and rhetorical case against scientific planning. Their cautionary tales about India’s ‘Permit-License-Raj’ helped to construct and sustain the project of delegitimizing state action and celebrating markets.     

场域理论视角下的国际移民研究——以安徽内陆新侨乡为例

论文介绍了场域理论,并运用场域理论对中国内陆山区新侨乡的国际移民潮进行分析。通过对场域、资本和村民＂习性＂的研究,从外在的社会结构和内在的个体心理结构两方面来考察新移民活动,为新侨乡研究提供一种新的观察解读模式。笔者认为新移民场域内资本的流动和转换是推动国际移民潮出现和变化的关键因素。随着各种资本向内陆山区农村的转移,新侨乡的范围和国际移民的数量将会继续扩大。     

Migration and the location of MNE activities: Evidence from Italian provinces

We investigate the migration-inward foreign direct investment (FDI) nexus in narrow geographies. A novel two-stage empirical strategy allows us to investigate the role of migration as a determinant of multinational enterprises (MNEs) location choices and unpick heterogeneity in foreign investors' preferences towards the presence of migrants in the host location. This allows us to shed light on the relative importance of the underlying mechanisms linking migration and inward FDI. Relying on 1113 greenfield investments by 895 MNEs in Italian NUTS3 regions over 2003–2015, we find that immigrants from the country of origin of the investor exert a positive but highly heterogeneous effect on MNE location choices. Investors are more sensitive to the presence of migrants from their country of origin when they lack experience in the destination country (first-time investors) and when their investments concern market-access or business-services (downstream) activities. This is consistent with the view that migrants act as information brokers that bridge the fixed costs of international business activities.     

全球资本主义:三次重大转型——对于经济—社会关系的社会—哲学解读

从19世纪起,资本主义社会向工业时代过渡,经济、文化与价值观等各方面都发生了转变,这些转变为经济与社会的关系问题提供了研究基础。19世纪至今的资本主义可以划分为三个发展阶段,即自由资本主义阶段、有组织的资本主义阶段和非西方式的民主经济阶段。可将一个阶段向另一个阶段的过渡称为大转型。每一次转型都是资本主义现代性类型出现危机的结果,而新的现代性类型是通过寻找新的社会价值和社会组织关系来形成的。分析资本主义三次大转型的经济、社会根源,可以清晰地洞察资本主义的过去、现在和未来。同时,三次大转型的新理论框架为预测全球资本主义的未来发展方向提供了理论基础。     

The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

Industrial District and the Multiplication of Labour: The Chinese Apparel Industry in Prato,Italy

Since the 1990s, the Chinese apparel industry in Prato has developed from a few stitching workshops into full‐fledged production networks. However, persistent disparity between the Chinese and Italian labor has triggered widespread social tensions. Drawing upon the recent literature of critical labor studies, this paper offers a different perspective to see the disparity in terms of the multiplication of labor across scales. The Chinese labor in Prato is made cheap and flexible by the proliferation of institutional and social borders, which were in turn inadvertently produced by Italian immigration policies, Chinese social norms, and local and regional economic conditions. In particular, the Chinese migrant workers have played an active role in producing social borders and in their own exploitation. Therefore, the labor polarization in Prato can hardly be solved by local institutional arrangements, and Italian trade unions have failed to organize the Chinese migrant labor in Prato.     

移民网络、社会资源配置与中国东北新移民--美国旧金山湾区田野调查札记

在田野调查访谈的基础上,本文以美国旧金山湾区的中国东北新移民为研究实例,对社会资本和非制度性的社会资源配置在当代中国的跨国移民活动中所扮演的具体角色进行考察和分析。本文认为,近年来迅速崛起的东北新移民已开始成为当代中国国际移民潮的主要成员之一。近10多年来东北地区之所以会出现大规模移民海外的现象,其中既有古典经济学移民理论所提出的经济层面的原因,也有中国社会内部制度变迁的深层因素。而非制度性社会资源配置机制中的强、弱两种关系网,尤其是海外新移民社会中的弱关系网络,则对当代东北人的跨境迁徙活动及其在海外移居社会寻找工作等方面做出了莫大的贡献。     

A passage from India: Geographies and experiences of repatriation, 1858-1939

This paper examines both the imagined and material geographies of return experienced by the imperial elite as they returned from India. Focusing on Cheltenham and Bedford, I explore how the 'aristocratic' lifestyles of earlier repatriates became increasingly difficult to sustain over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although imaginatively constructed notions of return continued to imply that an upper middle-class standard of living remained attainable for those returning 'home', the majority found that they had to settle in (lower) middle-class suburban locations. In considering such changes I am also able to examine the ways in which geographies and experiences of return were influenced by a specifically imperial identity over a period of imperial decline.     

Baghla, Ghanja and Kotia: Distinguishing the Baghla from the Suri Ghanja and the Indian Kotia

The western-Indian-Ocean ship-types known as baghla s, ghanja s and kotia s, and previously thought to have been differentiated only by detail of decoration, are shown to have significant morphological and structural differences. Some of those differences are attributed to the different technologies or traditions of shipbuilding found in Arabia, Persia and India.
© 2006 The Author     

Linking Gentrification and Labour Market Precarity in the Contemporary City: A Framework for Analysis

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call “weak” and “strong” links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of “gentrification‐supporting” and “gentrification‐fostered” labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.     

Migration,nursing, institutional discrimination and emotional/affective labour: ethnicity and labour stratification in the UK National Health Service

The UK has a long history of recruiting foreign nurses to meet labour shortages. This article explores the ways in which a combination of institutional discrimination in recruitment and promotion and daily interactions and practices in the workplace practices constructed migrant nurses as less skilled and inappropriately embodied and so restricted their overall career trajectories. Based on qualitative research with migrant nurses of Caribbean and Asian origins who came to the UK in the post-war era, we show how race and ethnicity were the basis of initial restrictions in training leading to permanent stratification in the nursing labour force. In the interactive and emotional labours of caring, foreign-born nurses are subjected to stereotypical and normative assumptions about their attributes and skills from colleagues, managers and patients that affect their opportunities to progress within the National Health Service. We thus combine an analysis of institutional discrimination with an understanding of cultural practices in the workplace to explain their disadvantaged position.     

Generation and accumulation of oil and condensates in the Wenchang A Sag, western Pearl River Mouth Basin, South China Sea

The Pearl River Mouth (PRM) Basin is one of four Cenozoic basins in the South China Sea, and the Wenchang A Sag is a secondary depression in the western part of the basin. Both the Wenchang and Enping formations contain good source rocks in the western PRM Basin; however, only the latter has been considered a likely source of the discovered oil and gas. New data from fluid inclusions and the analysis of oil–source rock correlations for the WC10-3 oil and gas pools indicate two stages of petroleum charging, the earlier originating from the Wenchang Formation and the later from the Enping Formation. Kinetics of petroleum generation and structural evolution modeling were employed to further investigate the mechanism of formation of the WC10-3 oil and gas pools. It was shown that the crucial condition for the formation of pools is the time of development of the structural trap. The Wenchang Formation source rocks generated oil from 25 to 14 Ma in the possible source area of the WC10-3 oil and gas pools in the Wenchang A Sag, so that only traps formed earlier than this period could capture oil sourced by the Wenchang Formation. The Enping Formation source rock experienced its oil window from 18 Ma to the present with the main stage of oil generation from 15 to 5 Ma. During this period structural traps in the sag continued to form until movements became weak, so that most pools in the Wenchang A Sag originated from the Enping Formation source rock. The likely dissipation of oil and gas from the earlier stage of charging should be taken into account in assessing the oil potential of the Wenchang A Sag.