Labour Relations and the Transfer of Knowledge in Industrial Clusters: Why do Skilled Workers Share Knowledge with Colleagues in Other Firms?

Industrial clusters are held to offer competitive advantages to firms that accrue from the transfer of tacit knowledge between skilled workers co-located in spatially bound regions. This paper argues that informal knowledge transfers between skilled employees working in spatially bounded industrial clusters might have an association with the labour relationship between employers and employees. In the literature on industrial clusters general knowledge is readily traded through codified texts and collegial networks but high value, tacit knowledge transfers occur less frequently but are critical to the success of firms located in clusters. Tacit knowledge transfers are held to occur when workers move to other firms because of firm death or poaching but less frequently through contacts between colleagues from other firms. Industrial clusters are said to offer labour market advantages for skilled workers in the form of ample job opportunities and rising wages, which engender firm loyalty and discourage the transfer of tacit knowledge of competitive value to other firms. However, the limited empirical evidence available on actual working conditions for skilled workers in regional industrial clusters indicates that this argument is contestable. Some evidence suggests that there are limited wage premiums accruing to the industrial districts, a limited role for geographic proximity, and weak localised returns on seniority and education. We argue that in such circumstances high value knowledge between workers in different firms might be traded as an act of epistemic solidarity or sociability that disregards the interests of employer organisations. Such actions might vary by region and country in relation to the prevailing system of labour relations. Australian labour relations are offered as a case in point.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.     

“We Simply Have to Do that Stuff for our Survival”: Labour,Firm Innovation and Cluster Governance in the Canadian Automotive Parts Industry

Based on a case study of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union in southern Ontario we argue for a critical reconstruction of both the labour geography and industrial cluster literature. The former stresses the active role of labour in the formation of economic landscapes, but has yet to explore labour's agency in production and how labour institutions shape technological change, firm innovation and industrial policy and strategy. Conversely, much of the industrial cluster and regional innovation systems literature is silent on the role of unions and industrial relations institutions in fostering innovation. We conclude with two main points. First, while some contend that positive union roles in innovation can only stem from partnerships with management and team working, we argue that innovation is more likely to emerge and worker interests are better protected when traditional collective bargaining structures and progressive employment legislation play a central role. Second, positive workplace and cluster level cooperation in the Canadian automotive parts industry are jeopardized by the broader and ongoing macro‐economic restructuring of OEM global production networks due to over‐capacity and intense cost‐cutting pressures reverberating down the supply chain.     

Industrial Heritage Tourism and Regional Restructuring in the European Union

This paper explores the current trend among traditional industrial regions in Europe to launch initiatives in the field of 'industrial heritage tourism'. Increasingly, restoring and exploiting former industrial sites for touristic purposes is regarded as a useful strategy for regional renewal. After having discussed its background and categories, we argue that, theoretically, industrial heritage tourism could be an interesting 'new combination' for industrial areas in the European service economy. In practice, however, its effects for regional restructuring might be limited. Therefore, we suggest to re-use Europe's industrial heritage also for other economic activities than only tourism.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Industrial reorganisation and coal production in Australia, 1860–1982: an historical materialist analysis

From an historical materialist perspective, the essential quality of industrial change is that it is the product of conflict resident both in the relationship of struggle between capital and labour over the accumulation of surplus value and in the competitive relations between individual capitals over the appropriation of profits. This article is essentially methodological in that it identifies the specific competitive and conflictual determinants of profitability internal to an industry and the external influences of the wider economy which contribute to that industry's ‘relative’ profitability vis a vis investment capital. It argues that the emerging pattern of economic change is structured by a tendency towards crisis and declining profitability. The history of black coal production in Australia is examined in the light of this method and emerging theory of industrial reorganisation.     

Industrial policy in the EU: old dilemmas and new options

Industrial policy is highly controversial. Supporters claim it is necessary to address market failures. Critics argue that the danger of government failure is often higher and that such failure may lead to greater welfare loss. The EU justifies its industrial policy by pointing to the existence of transnational problems and to its unique ability to counter them. The EU has the capacity to coordinate national policies, to reduce redundancies, to control and limit national subsidies to industry. It also has a mandate for managing EU foreign trade and competition policy. There are five major industrial policy arenas. Technology policy has been relatively successful in certain fields like telecommunications or traffic‐control systems. In other fields, such as micro‐electronics and computers, the results have been mixed at best. Regional policy has had a limited developmental impact. On foreign‐trade policy, anti‐dumping measures have largely been a failure, though they have stimulated Japanese direct investment. A division of labour between the EU Commission and national, regional and local governments should be advanced with a view to formulating and implementing industrial policy. The regional and local levels should formulate policies aimed at strengthening specialized factors. The EU should concentrate primarily on fostering and shaping new lines of technological development and managing capacity reduction in declining industries.     

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley,Australia

This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.     

Challenging the ‘absent state’: Neoliberal extractivist governance and state effects in the northwest Peruvian Amazon

Natural resource extraction has been the base of Peruvian economic growth, notably since the neoliberalization of the economy in recent decades. Academic and media accounts portray Peru as an absent state – one of weak institutions to exert environmental control and guarantee citizens' rights – particularly in remote resource extraction areas. This article scrutinizes this idea of absence in the context of neoliberal extractivist governance, via the case of a mining conflict surrounding the creation of the Ichigkat Muja National Park (PNIM) in the Cordillera del Cóndor, in the northwest Peruvian Amazon. We argue that the state is not absent: it is the outcome of contested and re-negotiated relations, institutions, and ideologies. We posit that the goal of guaranteeing private investment shapes state agents' attitudes and interventions to address conflicts. Based on key informant interviews and the review of official social conflict reports, we examine two roles of the state: as a protector of rights and a provider of basic services. We find that, in this case, the regional government's recognition of citizens' rights appears ambiguous, and in general, the state's role as a provider of basic services is deployed to mitigate conflicts that affect significant extractive projects or involve intense social protest. Thus, the neoliberal project of the Peruvian state is mediated in complex relations, constituting a particular and evolving form of neo-extractivism, where social investment is functional to guarantee mining.     

Scaling Post‐Industrial Forestry: The Complex Implementation of National Forestry Regimes in the Southern Valleys of Wales

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increased geographical interest in the changing nature of forestry in the UK. Critical attention has been given to a transition from a previously dominant regime of industrial forestry, primarily concerned with the mass production of timber, to a post‐industrial regime, within which timber production sits alongside a broader range of social, economic and environmental objectives. Investigations of this transition, however, have been largely restricted to analyses of national policy discourse, with relatively little attention given to the implementation of post‐industrial forestry in regional and local spaces. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of this new forestry regime has been associated with a great deal of spatial complexity. Drawing on findings from recent research in the southern valleys of Wales, we highlight the complex geographies bound up with the implementation of national regimes of forestry in the UK, and the significant roles played by the local socio‐natural context in facilitating and resisting the implementation of new forestry regimes in particular spaces.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Problems of Optimal Location of an Industrial Complex

Reverting to the problem of location of the next major iron and steel plant, based on ore from the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, the authors present the pro-Siberian view. They contend that advocates of a Central Russian location of such a steel plant ignore both the water and land costs in the construction of such a complex, which would tend to argue against a western location, and the effect of such a complex in promoting regional development, which would have a positive impact in the underdeveloped eastern regions. Cost calculations are presented to show that even if the Siberian plant is supplied by long-haul ore from the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, a Siberian location would be of greater benefit to the Soviet economy as a whole than a Central Russian location. The benefit would be even more marked if the design calculations involved not just the choice of site for one iron and steel plant, but the comparative costs of an iron and steel plant (an energy-intensive industry) in Siberia and a labor-intensive industry in Central Russia. For the pro-European view in the choice of a steel-plant site, see the Gladkevich article in Soviet Geography, November 1971.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

Trade Union Internationalism in the Age of Seattle

It is widely recognised within and around the labour movement that labour (as wage work, as class identity, in the trade union form, as a partner in industrial relations, as a radical-democratic social movement, as a part of civil society) is in profound crisis. Even more is this the case for labour as an international movement at a time in which the old international capitalist order is being challenged by the new capitalist disorder. Recovery requires a critique of traditional labour internationalism, reconceptualisation, new kinds of analysis and a new dialogue and dialectic between interested parties. Presented here in turn are the following: (1) a critique of the union internationalism of the national/industrial/colonial era; (2) a reconceptualisation of unionism and labour internationalism appropriate to a globalised/networked/informatised capitalist era; (3) the millennial dialogue on labour and globalisation; and (4) the role of communication, culture and the new information and communication technology. The conclusion stresses the centrality of networking, communication and dialogue to the creation of a new labour internationalism. An extended resource list on international unionism is attached.     

A break from the past: The labor party and the political economy of Keynesian social democracy

Arguments about the nature of the Australian Labor Party have been somewhat revived over the past few years. Those who argue that there has been a fundamental break with Labor tradition are criticised from both the right of the labour movement and the Marxist left. Both, interestingly, argue that to see the Hawke‐Keating years as too distinct is to misread history. Both schools of thought argue that those who defend a Labor tradition ‐which is fundamentally different from contemporary Labor are glorifying the past. This paper gives an account of Keynesian social democracy, and employs a comparative case study of economic debate in the 1940s and 1980s, in order to argue that there has indeed been a fundamental change in Labor's approach to political economy.     

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.     

Multiple Trajectories: A Critique of Industrial Restructuring and the New Institutionalism

This article argues that the agrarian studies literature sheds new light on the multiple,nonlinear trajectories of capitalist development occurring in the context of accelerating global integration. Cast in relation to classical political economy, work on agrarian change is centrally concerned with multiple paths of agrarian transformation. It attends both to historically specificforms of social property relations and to the ways that struggles over resources and labor are simultaneously struggles over culturally constructed meanings, definitions, and identities. Accordingly, it goes well beyond the "new institutionalism" that figures prominently in the literature on industrial restructuring. The article draws on recent research in globally linked industrial districts in former bantustan areas of South Africa to illustrate thecontemporary and continuing salience of agrarian histories and concepts. It also suggests how attention to multiple trajectories of sociospatial change can be used to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Modern Slavery and Freedom: Exploring Contradictions through Labour Scandals in the Thai Fisheries

This paper examines the modern anti-slavery movement through the lens of the slavery scandal in Thailand’s fisheries sector. The slavery framing provoked a response on the part of governments, corporations and NGOs that produced improvements in working conditions. Nevertheless, we argue that while the slavery framing was effective in drawing attention and resources to solidarity groups, it provided a poor guide to action because of how it resolves complex and embodied relations of freedom and unfreedom into a simplified opposition that can be used to justify capitalism as the realm of freedom—rather than a cause of unfree labour or slavery. The Work in Fishing Convention (ILO C-188) has provided a guide for laws and regulations intended to improve working conditions in industrial fishing in Thailand and elsewhere, but it does not address slavery or human trafficking. It also frames work in fisheries as exceptional, and thus allows for working conditions that would be considered unacceptable on land. We suggest that critical scholars be cautious about working with a slavery framing, and that they might want to engage with working conditions in ways that start less with questions of unfree labour, and more with how capitalist labour practices can be constrained.     

What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

The particularities of place: geographies of gendered moral responsibilities among Latvian migrant workers in 1950s Britain

It is now widely accepted that gender relations take a spatially specific form. Distinctive national, regional and local patterns in the ways in which men and women divide paid labour and caring work result in an uneven geography of the total work of social reproduction and, it has been argued, distinctive regional or local gender cultures. It is also clear that the overall gender order and its geography undergo periodic change. Currently in Britain, and in many other industrial nations, the old gender order of industrial Fordism is collapsing and the traditional moral certainties of that period, perhaps most dominant in Britain in the 1950s, are being renegotiated. In the 1950s, women were expected to seek personal development by the direct care of others, whereas men fulfilled their moral obligations towards others by sharing the rewards of their independent work achievements. However, even during the 1950s, there was considerable diversity in the ways in which women and men undertook the social obligations of care and the division of responsibility for the total burden of social reproduction, especially among households in which women's labour market participation was significant. In this paper, drawing on oral histories undertaken with migrant women who came to Britain in the late 1940s from Latvia, I examine the gendered divisions of labour they established in the 1950s and critically assess the significance of spatially differentiated gender cultures for this group.