Whither labor geography and the rise of the robots?

The rise of the robots suggests a technological revolution like no other. It heralds potentially profound impacts on jobs and labor markets. Geographers have so far remained relatively quiet about such transformations. This commentary suggests ways in which social and cultural geographers can expand upon a robust labor geography and the debates surrounding the relationship between robots, robotic technologies, and labor. Six areas of engagement are offered that outline the richness and nuance of social and cultural geographical analysis related to the ‘rise of the robots’ at a time where much of the popular discourse around robotics is characterized by the extremities of either dystopian angst or positive boosterism. We call on social and cultural geographers to engage in conceptually rigorous and empirically informed research that provides novel ways of making sense of the multiple dimensions of our robotic futures.     

Whither the Developmental State in South Korea? Balancing Welfare and Neoliberalism

Abstract

Scholars of political economy have been debating the role of the Korean state in the economic development of the country, as the characteristics of a developmental state, a neoliberal state and/or a welfare state have appeared simultaneously in the various governments’ policies since the 1990s. This paper argues that although the nature, degree and extent of government intervention has varied from administration to administration, the basic stance of a developmental state has been retained while neoliberal and welfare policies have been used concurrently to further economic and social development. This coexistence of contradictory approaches reflecting alternative market economic systems was the product of a combination of government policies that has for the past 20 years provided the Korean government with the ability to deploy flexible policy mixes in response to changes in the political and economic environment and to maximise the outcomes of developmental policies.     

Below the Belt? Territory and Development in China's International Rise

China's internationalization has been heralded by some as a new era of South–South cooperation. Yet such framings of development are pitched at an abstract space of the ‘global South’ which conceals more than it reveals. With some theory moving towards ontologies of ‘global development’, we need to capture both the connectedness and the local specificity of increasingly diffuse processes. This article sets out a more fine‐grained understanding of how political territories and processes are imagined and produced by and through China's internationalization, focusing on infrastructure as a ‘technology’ of territorialization. Much of the focus on China's internationalization has been on state‐to‐state relations, but this obscures the ‘omni‐channel politics’ that China practises. Using a critical literature review and illustrative case study, this article develops the idea of omni‐channel politics to posit a view of ‘twisted’ territories in which political processes and development outcomes are more complex and contingent.     

Who Pays the Ferryman? Industry Policy and Shipbuilding in Australia

The lightweight fast ferry industry that has emerged in Australia over the last couple of decades has been a remarkable and surprising success story. Given the contraction of manufacturing in general and traditional shipbuilding in particular, its growth is all the more noteworthy. This paper analyses the evolution of the industry and considers the impact of industry policy on its development. Although the effectiveness of industry policy in Australia has generally been undermined by a lack of political support and inadequate integration with other government policies, it was, nevertheless, an important part of this industry's expansion.     

Strategizing for Autonomy: Whither Durability and Progressiveness?

What should autonomous formations work towards? How might they strategize to get there? This paper considers these what and how aspects in tandem—a necessary pursuit if clearer pathways to emancipation are to be realized. First, it conceptualizes the relationship between objectives of durability and progressiveness. I introduce “the durability trap”, a situation whereby autonomous formations achieve durability at the expense of their progressiveness, as well as the principles to overcome this. Second, it evaluates how autonomous formations might act collectively and vis‐à‐vis the state to achieve, or not, both durability and progressiveness. I compare the strategies two autonomous formations adopt in response to the development of Media Spree, a redevelopment project in Berlin. I show how symbiotic strategy results in the durability trap and how an interstitial approach works to overcome this. I end by conceiving strategies of interstitiality, symbiosis and rupture as sequential steps to wider transformation.     

Scales,Lines and Minor Geographies: Whither King Island?

These are exciting times for geographers, with stimulating possibilities being offered to the discipline by various bodies of poststructural, especially deleuzian, theory. There is, however, a dearth of empirical studies utilising these opportunities, particularly in Australian geography. King Island, located in Bass Strait, is used in this article to broach some theoretical potentials. First, we introduce deleuzian theory. Second, we view King Island through three geographic representations and respective mappings. Third, we discuss the implications of lived practices, which constitute various (major and minor) geographies on and of King Island, for existing perspectives on spatial relations and linear flows between local and global scales. Lastly, we explore some recent treatments of space inflected through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, consolidating some spatial concepts and relations gleaned from King Island's cartographic moments and movements.     

Whither Britishness? English and Scottish people in Scotland*1

Abstract. National identity, and especially what being British means, appears to have become more problematic in recent years. Our research on national identity over the last decade suggests that people regularly construct Britishness in quite diverse ways. This article focuses on ‘territorial’ identity and points to the limits of conventional survey work on national identity. It also explores how different conceptions of Britishness are developing within Scotland and England. Differences also emerge within the group of Scots‐born nationals, as well as English‐born migrants in Scotland, as the latter come to reassess how they construct Britishness, given the new context in which they find themselves. To assume one uniform, explicit meaning of Britishness is, in short, highly problematic.     

Women Workers and the Promise of Ethical Trade in the Globalised Garment Industry: A Serious Beginning?

The paper gives an overview of the recent development within the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), especially the development of corporate codes of conduct, and considers the prospects they offer for improving labour conditions for workers in the international garments industry. It argues that two specific features of the industry—competitive production systems based on international subcontracting and the use of predominantly female production workers—are likely to undermine the effective development of a codes-based strategy. Nevertheless, the labour rights agenda at the centre of ETI does provide a space for labour activists, whether operating in or out of formal union structures, to build campaigns and connections around global production networks.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage

Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used to provide surveillance and attack capabilities within war zones. At the heart of much of the rhetoric about these aircraft is their supposed ability to enable persistent presence across the battlespace. They are also unique in that they actively distance the aircrew from the aircraft. This paper seeks to question whether this claim to persistent presence can be justified and considers the implications of the distancing of pilot from machine in this. In order to achieve this, the paper focuses upon conceptualising UAVs as assemblages, composed of both human and machine elements. It uses firsthand accounts from a Royal Air Force Reaper UAV aircrew as a basis to analyse the ways in which the deployment of these aircraft in Afghanistan is changing the ways that war is experienced by aerial combatants. It does this through the utilisation of a feminist, embodied geopolitics, refiguring it from a concern with victims of war to argue for its use to understand the micro-scale of how the humans within these UAV assemblages experience combat. This paper thus focuses upon the extent to which the Reaper UAV achieves a persistent presence through analysis of its supposed more-than-human loitering and vision abilities, and the limitations associated with the requirement for a human-in-the loop. The paper contends that although UAVs like the Reaper change the geopolitics of combat, the continuing requirement for the human element of the assemblage restricts their ability to provide persistent presence.     

Whither Japan? Changing Japan,changing Asia,changing the World

Jean‐Marie Bouissou. Japan: the Burden of Success, trans. Jonathan Derrick. London: Hurst and Company, in association with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris, 2002. xx, 374 pp. US$19.95, paper.

Aurelia George Mulgan. Japan's Failed Revolution: Koizumi and the Politics of Economic Reform. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press at the Australian National University, 2002. ix, 260 pp. A$42.00 (incl. GST); US$36.00, paper.

Mitsuaki Okabe. Cross Shareholdings in Japan: a New Unified Perspective of the Economic System. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2002. xiii, 104 pp. £45.00/US$70.00, hardcover.

Peter Drysdale and Dong Dong Zhang (eds). Japan and China: rivalry or Cooperation in Asia? Canberra: Asia Pacific Press at the Australian National University, 2000. xi, 182 pp. A$ 25.00, paper.

Greg Austin and Stuart Harris. Japan and Greater China: political Economy and Military Power in the Asian Century. London: Hurst and Company, 2001. xv, 368 pp. £45.00, hardcover; £16.95, paper.     

Silo or Vat? Observations on the Ancient Textile Industry in Malta and Early Phoenician Interests in the Island

This paper concerns the Bronze Age/Phoenician contact period, focusing on a cache of pottery from Mtarfa, Malta, excavated by Ward Perkins in 1939, and the evidence of coastal and other pits, possibly used in the process of dyeing textile. Dyed fabric, it is argued, may have been the reason for Phoenician contact with the island prior to colonization. Murex shells and other possible dye sources within Malta are discussed.     

Clusters and Industry 4.0 – do they fit together?

Industry 4.0 heralds the profound transformation of business models by enabling the fusion of virtual and real worlds and the application of digitization, automatization and robotics in manufacturing. We review the basic premises of Industry 4.0 and map them against the clusters’ features with the aim to establish the kind of relations between these two categories. By exploring the likely impact of clusters on Industry 4.0, our discussion revolves around the broader question of the role of regional ecosystems in industrial transformation. Clusters, thanks to the advantages such as knowledge base and mechanisms, agglomeration economies and externalities (labour pool and critical mass of firms) and favourable more stable, less uncertain environment of trust and cooperation, may facilitate the digital transformation, particularly its phasing-in and testing phases. Notwithstanding this potential, it should be stressed that not all clusters would be able to play such prominent role. Only these equipped with adequate knowledge base and providing some expertise in the field of IT solutions, robotics, automatics, and so on, i.e. the technologies crucial to Industry 4.0 seem predestined to contribute to the emergence of fully fledged industrial internet. Despite seemingly some inconsistency between these two categories, clusters can facilitate the business transformation towards Industry 4.0.     

What Accounts for the Resilience and Vulnerability of Clusters? The Case of Istanbul's Film Industry

In this paper, the film cluster in Turkey's cultural capital, Istanbul, is examined with the ultimate purpose of contributing towards a better understanding of the dynamics shaping the resilience and vulnerability of clusters. The paper seeks to shed light on the issue of how and why, in the face of a similar set of threats, Hollywood has proved so resilient but Istanbul's film cluster so vulnerable. Scrutinizing the emergence and the subsequent lock-in of the particular path followed by the Istanbul cluster and investigating the attributes of the proximate business environment that have been shaped along the way reveal that sustainability of a cluster seems to depend on three interrelated factors: how the cluster participants strategically respond to the upcoming threats, the structural capacity of the cluster to overcome such threats, and finally, the macro-socio-economic conditions (both at the national and global levels) against which the challenges occur and which mitigate or exacerbate them.