URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY: INTRODUCTION

I used to think that what was needed was to bring the mountain people into the “economic mainstream.” I thought it would be possible to do this and still preserve some of the positive, humanizing qualities of mountain cultures. I no longer think that is either possible or desirable. Our challenge is not to join mainstream America. It is to recreate (and) renew … what the mountains have always been … an alternative to mainstream America. This alternative is nearer to being absorbed today than it has ever been in the past. The task before us is to renew this alternative and endow it with the capabilities it will need to survive in late Twentieth Century America. (Mike Smathers, Mountain Life and Work , February, 1973, p. 19).     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF NO-GROWTH

Problems of scarcity generate critical political issues as advanced industrial societies shift away from growth-oriented economies. This analysis recommends substituting more abundant political resources for scarce economic ones. Appropriate scenario resulting from these substitution patterns are subjected to speculative analysis.     

政治地理学与知识经济

知识经济的到来,极大地改变着区域的政治、经济和文化,改变着人类活动的时间、空间和方式,向政治地理学提出了新的挑战,也为其发展提供了新的机遇。政治地理学和知识经济有着必然的联系,使传统意义上的政治区域、区域政治的概念发生了巨大的变化,政治地理学必然要研究知识经济。本文就政治地理学与知识经济的关系进行了探讨。就如何在继承研究政治地理学传统的基础上,拓展研究空间,为区域政治、经济和文化服务,提出了相关的建议。     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORKER PENSION FUNDS

Increasing concentration of economic power within the corporate sector, as well as the extent of corporate control by a few financial institutions such as commercial banks, have been subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in recent years. However, the role of private and public worker retirement trusts in providing power for institutional investors has not been adequately addressed. Pension fund assets, which were relatively inconsequential prior to 1960, and their investment in and share of total corporate equities minor, have grown to over $l410 billion by the end of 1977. In their analysis of and interest in public and private pension trusts, scholars, employers and even employees have tended to emphasize narrow economic issues such as investment performance. It is the central argument of this article that workers’ funds have become a major source of capital in the American economy, and as such have been used to help create and/or sustain practices that adversely impinge on workers themselves. It is argued that pension assets have contributed to: 1) the increasing power of financial institutions; 2) growth of corporate profits that only minimally benefit some pension plan participants; 3)capital shortages for 'socially useful’ investments; and 4)support of corporate enterprises that refuse basic worker demands including unionization itself. The study further suggests that the rapidly growing pension assets have the potential to serve‘the public interest’ as well as the needs of workers. Threat of withdrawal of funds from selected money managers and corporations, and utilization of share–holder voting rights to influence corporate policies can be potent weapons for organized labor. Since this is an exploratory analysis, the aim of the article is to gather, present and clarify basic information on worker pension trusts and to propose alternative avenues for future research in this critical area.     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

INTRODUCTION: PROCESSES OF CHANGE IN URBAN SYSTEMS*

ABSTRACT The twenty‐first century will be one of intensified urbanization, on a scale never before experienced. How do urban systems and individual cities change and develop? The social sciences have many different approaches to analyzing the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of urban change. We inventory some of these approaches and their implications for public policy toward cities, urban change, and economic development.