A Note on the Benefits to Current Residents of State Employment Growth: Is There an Industry Mix Effect on Migration?

Although there is evidence that regional employment growth benefits current residents, an unexplored aspect of this relationship is the industry composition of the growth. Using 1981–1991 migration data for the 48 contiguous U.S. states, this paper examines whether the industry mix of employment growth matters for migration. We find that state employment growth that results from having a larger share of nationally fast-growing industries leads to less net in-migration compared to growth that results from each industry in the state growing faster than its national average. Therefore, state employment growth that is attributable to its mix of industries yields greater benefits for current state residents.     

Negotiating Femininity: Women and representation in emergency employment in Peru

This article analyses the contradictory nature of the 'new space' created by women working in emergency employment programmes in Peru. It focuses on the different forms of opposition towards this new space and illustrates the mechanisms women have used in order to negotiate their place within it. The article briefly outlines the role played by the Peruvian state in legitimating this new space for women and argues that with the representations women make of themselves, of other workers, and of their workplace, these employees take strategic steps in forging new femininities. Empirical evidence is used to show how women simultaneously identify difference and commonality with their fellow female workers. In theoretical terms, the implications of these processes are examined in the context of the reproduction and subversion of stereotypes and the contestation of dominant gendered ideologies in Peru. The article examines how the reproduction and subversion of stereotypes involves the manipulation of binary categories of 'good' and 'bad' women. It argues that strategic representations, in everyday contexts, are vital to the renegotiation of femininities. It introduces the notions of 'strategic representations' and 'contradictory spaces' to examine some of the debates concerning the role of 'survival strategies' in gender and development analysis.     

Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests

Summary

Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true interest were high: the survival and prosperity of the state. The dominance of ‘mercantilism’ as a historiographical category has obscured the role of interest in early modern thought. This paper examines the work of one of England's most prolific interest writers, Slingsby Bethel, to demonstrate the importance of reading interest writings without recourse to mercantilism. The two focuses are, first, how the rhetoric of counsel was used to defend an ordinary subject's presumption to comment on state affairs and, second, the capacity for interest writers to construe the rise and fall of state power in terms of good laws and statesmanship.     

Challenges in ‘Translating’ Human Rights: Perceptions and Practices of Civil Society Actors in Western India

Rights‐based approaches have become prevalent in development rhetoric and programmes in countries such as India, yet little is known about their impact on development practice on the ground. There is limited understanding of how rights work is carried out in India, a country that has a long history of indigenous rights discourse and a strong tradition of civil society activism on rights issues. In this article, we examine the multiple ways in which members of civil society organizations (CSOs) working on rights issues in the state of Rajasthan understand and operationalize rights in their development programmes. As a result of diverse ‘translations’ of rights, local development actors are required to bridge the gaps between the rhetoric of policy and the reality of access to healthcare on the ground. This article illustrates that drawing on community‐near traditions of activism and mobilization, such ‘translation work’ is most effective when it responds to local exigencies and needs in ways that the universal language of human rights and state development discourse leave unmet and unacknowledged. In the process, civil society actors use rights‐based development frameworks instrumentally as well as normatively to deepen community awareness and participation on the one hand, and to fix the state in its role as duty bearer of health rights, on the other hand. In their engagement with rights, CSO members work to reinforce but also challenge neoliberal modes of health governance.     

The Emergence of a Working Poor: Labour Markets,Neoliberalisation and Diverse Economies in Post‐Socialist Cities

Abstract: This paper examines the transformations of urban labour markets in two central European cities: Bratislava, Slovakia and Kraków, Poland. It highlights the emergence of in‐work poverty and labour market segmentation, which together are leading to a reconfiguration of the livelihoods and economic practices of urban households. The focus of the paper is on the growing phenomenon of insecure, poor‐quality, contingent labour. It examines the ways in which those who find themselves in, or on the margins of, contingent and insecure labour markets sustain their livelihoods. We ask how such workers and their households negotiate the segmentation of the labour market, the erosion of employment security and the emergence of in‐work poverty and explore the diverse economic practices of those who cannot rely solely on formal employment to ensure social reproduction. Further, we assess the articulations between labour market participation and exclusion, and other spheres of economic life, including informal and illegal labour, household social networks, state benefits and the use of material assets. We argue that post‐socialist cities are seeing a reconfiguration of class processes, as the materialities and subjectivities of class are remade and as the meaning of work and the livelihoods different forms of labour can sustain are changing.     

International Nuclear Relations After the Indian and Pakistani Test Explosions

India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests have dismayed the international community. However, they can be seen as a culmination of the deterioration of international nuclear relations that has taken place since the mid-1990s. The author examines the reasons for this deterioration which he finds in US–Russian relations, the Middle East and South Asia, in disputes over arms control objectives, and in normative and procedural dilemmas that emerged as the number of countries with nuclear weapon programmes was reduced to a 'hard core' of eight states. This discussion provides the background for an assessment of the consequences of the actions of India and Pakistan. Despite the dangers, the author stresses the opportunities that could lie ahead. If key states act positively and cooperatively, the climate and processes of nuclear arms control could be transformed.     

Spaces of Governance: Gender and public sector restructuring in Canada

While the literature on economic restructuring tends to understand neoliberalism as a uniform governance ideology or economic-political reality, we suggest that it is more useful to understand neoliberalism as a loosely knit assemblage of programmatic efforts that consist of various political rationalities and practices of rule that aim to manage social conduct. The paper focuses on the various ways that these efforts are connected to complex state rescaling processes in Canada. Specifically, the first part of the paper examines the restructuring of nation-state responsibilities in social service and security provisions. It illustrates the shift toward a new citizenship regime that renders women as active agents who are responsible for solving problems in an individualized manner. The second part of the paper exemplifies how neoliberal programmatic efforts create new spaces of governance, particularly those of flexibility through non-standard work. The massive rescaling of the public sector, the decreasing demand for women's ‘traditional’ occupations, and the increasing prevalence of women in non-standard work arrangements constitute women as political-economic subjects in new ways. We analyze these processes using data drawn from in-depth interviews with personnel in the Canadian Federal Public Service. We outline some of the implications these initiatives have had on public service programmes and various public sector groups. Additionally, we provide a selection of individual accounts of public sector restructuring and gendered work by professionals and contract workers employed in the public service, and offer empirical illustrations of the contentions surrounding neoliberal restructuring initiatives.     

Adjusting to Equity: The Contradictions of Neoliberalism and the Search for Racial Equality in Peru

This article traces the development of race equity initiatives in Peru in the context of economic "liberalisation" and Western cultural hegemony. Drawing on interviews with Peruvian antiracist educators, we argue that the development of race equity programmes is being shaped by contradictory sociopolitical pressures. On the one hand, these initiatives reflect the forces of neoliberal intervention and reorganisation. On the other, they are the products of the challenges presented to conservative and antiegalitarian traditions by those committed to social justice. The paper also examines how the "new" equity paradigms associated with neoliberalism are acting to obscure the existence of other antidiscrimination traditions within Peru.     

Regionalism in Central Asia: New Geopolitics, Old Regional Order

Behind the rhetoric of regional cooperation, the Central Asian states have been embroiled with increasing frequency in conflicts among themselves, including trade wars, border disputes and disagreements over the management and use of water and energy resources. Far from engendering a new regional order in Central Asia, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent basing of US troops in the region have served to entrench pre-existing patterns of regional cooperation, while highlighting the obstacles that have beset the regionalization process there since the mid-1990s. While all five Central Asian states have been attempting to use the renewed rivalry between Russia and the United States, which is being played out in the Central Asian region, to maximize their strategic and economic benefits, the formation of the United States–Uzbekistan strategic partnership has increased the resolve of the other Central Asian states (Turkmenistan excepted) to balance Uzbekistan's preponderance by enthusiastically pursuing regional projects involving Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. This regional dynamic has resulted in the steady gravitation of the centre of regionalism in Central Asia to the north from a nominal Tashkent–Astana axis to a more stable Astana–Moscow one, with possible repercussions for the poorer states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The article examines the major constraints on regionalism in Central Asia, considering in particular the ways in which the personalist, non-democratic regimes of Central Asia have obstructed state–centric 'top–down' regionalism as well as informal regionalist processes 'from below'.     

Participatory work with young children: the trouble and transformation of age-based hierarchies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways that participatory work with young children was actually lived in practice, in one early childhood setting. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the paper argues that disruption of age-based hierarchy was key for making space and time for young children’s meaningful participation. Practitioners held a strong, nuanced view of young children’s ‘richness’, rather than defining young children in terms of what they lack. The finished state of adulthood was troubled, with adults seen as fellow ‘emergent becomings’, in the process of learning alongside children. However, despite conscious efforts to deconstruct age-based hierarchy, age and life experience remained troublesome concepts at the nursery. The paper examines tensions and limitations in how far adults were willing to cede control to young children, focusing on the example of care routines. The paper contends that participatory work with children must itself be maintained as a space for inquiry and reflection.     

Workers’ Compensation and State Employment Growth*

Abstract. Workers’ compensation reforms have been on the table in virtually every state over the last several years, and many states have launched comprehensive reforms. At least nine states undertook major reforms of their workers’ compensation systems in 2004 alone, and the reforms were driven largely by claims that higher workers’ compensation costs are driving away businesses and the employment that comes with them. This paper examines the relationship between workers’ compensation costs, as proxied by benefits/earnings, and employment across U.S. states and the District of Columbia from 1976 to 2000. Workers’ compensation costs are found to have a statistically significant negative impact on employment and wages, but the elasticities are very small, suggesting that workers’ compensation is not a likely cause of jobs woes in most states. Unemployment insurance appears to have an effect of similar magnitude. Medical cost inflation is found to be a significant factor in explaining movements in workers’ compensation costs over time.     

State Life: Land,Welfare and Management of the Landless in Kerala,India

The pressing need to manage the spiralling number of landless people around the world has compelled several states to experiment with scattered land distribution programmes in combination with welfare transfers, instead of comprehensive land reform. This article examines the chasm between land demands and state responses in such contexts. Focusing on the Aralam resettlement site for the landless Adivasis in Kerala, India, it argues that management of the landless could take the form of ‘state life’ — a life envisaged by the state rather than the life the people wish to lead. Three interlinked processes are shown to shape state life in Kerala: the reduction of land to welfare, amplified welfare transfers and the mobilization of assumptions about the target population. State life enables states to extinguish simmering land struggles in the short term, but ultimately it reproduces landlessness.     

Banning the barmaid: time,space and alcohol licensing in 1900s Glasgow

This article examines the decision of Glasgow’s magistrates at the beginning of the twentieth century to prohibit the employment of barmaids in the city's public houses, tracing the origins and advocates of the ban as well its effects on the licensed trade and the women who worked behind bars. It responds to Mariana Valverde’s recent work on the relationship between time and space in the operation of law, analysing the ways in which the magistrates sought to differentiate between licensed premises and practices so as to police the gendered boundaries of urban work and leisure culture. By attending to these vital processes of differentiation, in conclusion, it argues for research in social and cultural geography that explicitly connects the experience and management of the temporality of drinking practices to the production and regulation of licensing’s perhaps more obviously spatial geographies.     

The future lies beneath: Mineral science,resource-making,and the (de)differentiation of the Peruvian underground

Engaging with recent scholarship on the relations among science, resources, and territory, this paper examines the role of late-nineteenth-century mineral science in the rendering of the Peruvian underground as a knowable and actionable space. I focus on the mineralogical work of Italian-born naturalist Antonio Raimondi, identifying in it a dual dynamic of geo-political differentiation and ontological dedifferentiation. On the one hand, Raimondi constructs Peruvian national territory as distinct due to the abundance and diversity of minerals contained in its subsurface. On the other, his mineralogy was undergirded by the idea that Peru's minerals were ontologically equivalent to minerals anywhere else, and thus knowable through ‘universal’ scientific knowledge practices. Both aspects of Raimondi's mineral science reflected an underlying aim: stimulating the ‘rebirth’ of Peruvian mining. Yet, I suggest that the influence of Raimondi's mineralogical work on the history of resource-making in Peru lay not in its immediate utility for political-economic calculation, but rather in its contribution to an imaginary of Peru as mineral-rich and underexploited. In conclusion, I call attention to the need for research on the political economies of Earth science to approach science as an historically and geographically situated practice, to attend to the multiple (e.g., calculative and symbolic) dimensions of scientific activities, and to be attentive to ways in which the logics and aims of Earth science may not fully intersect with those of capital and the state.     

A Britain that everyone is proud to call home? The bedroom tax,political rhetoric and home unmaking in U.K. housing policy

This paper explores the prominence of rhetorics of home in UK politics. Through the analysis of key prime ministerial speeches, I trace the lineage of home in political rhetoric, paying particular attention to the ways in which the imaginary of the homespace has been moralised through tenure type. The paper examines the ways in which both of the country’s major political parties have utilised rhetoric that places homeliness and homemaking at the centre of citizenship construction and nation-building, whilst simultaneously introducing housing policies that contribute to class-based acts of home unmaking. The final section of the paper examines the case study of the bedroom tax as an example of the power and influence of rhetorics of home. I draw on interviews with social tenants affected by the policy to highlight some of the consequences of the moralisation of the home, and the everyday impacts of home unmaking policies. Conceptually, the paper makes a dual contribution to social and cultural geographies. Firstly, I highlight the need for a stronger dialogue between critical geographies of home and geographies of housing literature. Secondly, the paper utilises home unmaking as an integral, and yet relatively underexplored, means of extending critical geographies of home literature.     

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.     

Recent Books in the Field of Medieval Languages and Literatures

This article examines the contradictions underlying the Falangist feminine ideal as it oscillated between demure/traditional and enterprising/modern in the rhetoric of the Sección Femenina. As the author demonstrates, the peculiarity of the Sección Femenina—which acted as the dominant cultural filter for women's familial, social, and political obligations at the time—stems from its leaders' at once-dominated (vis-à-vis the state) and dominant (vis-à-vis the female constituents) position in the cultural, social, national, and political landscape of post-civil war Spain. Although the retrograde ways of the Sección Femenina, whose statutes and rhetoric drew on the nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse of different and complementary gender relations, have elicited numerous studies, this article examines the use of this familiar and unthreatening (to the regime) model of female formation as the legitimating basis of its unconventional praxis.     

Contesting uneven development: The political geography of natural gas rents in Peru and Bolivia

Political and academic debates about the distribution of resource rents to producing areas have addressed the issue of whether or not the transfers unleash conflicts. While this kind of debate is valid, the present paper argues that such a discussion is missing the point regarding the processes behind said types of conflicts, as well as how such conflicts are framed at the sub-national political geography of the state. By more deeply exploring these dimensions, the argument of this paper is that the production of uneven development within sub-national areas is crucial for understanding the above-mentioned conflicts and how the central state internalises those conflicts, producing new political geographies of rent distribution. As such, different territorial discourses of autonomy emerge along with uneven development, but their capacity to reach institutional autonomy is grounded on the spatial politics of each state. Empirically, this paper analyses how natural gas rents are distributed to sub-national producing areas in Peru and Bolivia, and how the production of uneven development through natural gas rents at sub-national level re-activated previous territorial demands for autonomy, which were internalised by central states in different ways.     

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.     

Regional Industrial Modernization Programmes: Two Cases from Massachusetts

Faced with the dramatic loss of manufacturing employment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two regions of Massachusetts became home to innovative industrial modernization programmes designed to enhance the performance of remaining enterprise and hopefully strengthen the state's manufacturing base. The Machine Action Project, a community and industry based endeavour in Western Massachusetts, worked with hundreds of metalworking firms while in Eastern Massachusetts the University of Massachusetts Lowell restructured many of its existing academic and research activities to better meet the needs of firms and communities. These two programmes are analysed for the ways in which they established public-private partnerships to enhance their regional economies as well as contributed to the ongoing discussion over the role of public institutions in sustainable regional development.