Women's and Men's Work: The Production and Marketing of Fresh Food and Export Crops in Papua New Guinea

Fresh food markets have been a fixture of the social and economic landscape of urban and rural PNG since colonial times. They were often the first points of engagement with the market economy, especially for women, who as small‐scale producers, sold surplus produce from their food gardens located on communally‐owned land. Although local food markets have remained an important livelihood for women, the later adoption and expansion of perennial export cash crops like coffee and cocoa overshadowed food production for local markets as men dominated export crop production on land alienated from communal ownership for decades or permanently. New forms of social relations of production and more exclusive forms of land tenure emerged to accommodate export crop production that were very different from those governing the production and marketing of fresh food. Market values and a trend towards individualisation of production with less capacity to mobilise labour through reciprocal labour exchange networks have characterised export crop production. With the income benefits captured largely by men, women began redirecting their labour to fresh food production where they were able to exercise more control of production and income while still mobilising labour through indigenous labour exchange arrangements. Attempts by men to appropriate the income of women and sons’ labour in export cropping were greater during flush periods when income levels were high, and they were less likely to attempt to appropriate this income in low crop periods when incomes were lower. However, with the recent emergence of female entrepreneurers earning relatively large sums of money in large‐scale, profit‐driven vegetable production, the moral frameworks governing food production are coming to resemble those governing export crops, and making labour more difficult to mobilise. Despite women being key players in these changes, we argue there is an emerging risk that men will attempt to assert control over this income or move into vegetable production themselves and possibly marginalise women in the process.     

Requiem or rebirth? Internal labour markets and labour market restructuring in the Kitchener and Sault Ste. Marie regions

Since the 1980s, social scientists and economic geographers have stressed that 'standard' forms of employment and internal labour markets (ILMs) which characterized Fordism have declined and have been displaced by post-Fordist non-standard and contingent employment arrangements. However, some researchers are critical of the assumptions of a universal decline in ILMs and stress that although ILMs have been significantly restructured, they remain an important part of firm employment strategies. On the basis of a postal survey and interviews conducted with ninety firms and institutions in Kitchener-Waterloo and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1995–1996, I assess the role of ILMs. Although shifts towards non-standard arrangements are evident, employers are clearly aware of the need to maintain if not develop ILM structures. Finally, I argue that geographers need to reconceptualize the relationships between ILMs and external labour markets (ELMs) as integrated phenomena. Thus firms do not use contingent or ELMs and ILMs in exclusion to each other but as part of a continuum of strategies leading to increased blurring of the ILM and ELMs.     

Competitiveness and Technological Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Evidence from the Indonesian Electronics and Garment Sectors

Indonesia is a rapidly growing and internationally competitive economy that is well integrated into globalized production systems. The global value chain (GVC) model has proven to be a popular analytical framework to explain how global lead firms structure and organize global production through dispersed global suppliers. Indonesia's leading export sectors, garments and electronics, are well integrated into GVCs. Engagement in GVCs, often led by leading global brands, is seen as a basis for local producers to become globally competitive and to grow. It also comes with challenges—local producers must meet the demanding pressures from lead firms on prices, on-time delivery, product quality, and social, environmental and labour standards. The possibilities for local producers to learn, acquire new capabilities and upgrade to enhance their competitiveness are often conditioned by the nature of ties that they have with their global lead firms. Yet, this paper argues, the GVC model fails to recognize agency on the part of local firms in this learning process. Moreover, particular forms of governance arrangements within GVC ties can restrict the prospects for local producers to enhance capabilities and upgrade. Drawing on selected case study evidence from the Indonesian garments and electronics sectors, the paper explores the relationship between distinct types of GVC engagements and firm-level learning and upgrading, and considers how some GVC ties may restrict upgrading.     

Organizing European Labour: Governance, Production, Trade Unions and the Question of Scale

This paper addresses two main debates: the recent geographical literature on trade union strategy and structure, and contemporary accounts of European labour market governance. Geographers have begun to take notice of organized labour just as it has faced a series of unprecedented challenges, which are partly derived from ongoing changes in the organization of production. In interpreting these debates I focus on the process of scaling – the ways in which the politics of labour market governance are constituted in, and are at the same time constitutive of, one geographical scale or another. These issues are explored through two key recent developments: the changing status of the European Trade Union Confederation, and the creation of European Works Councils. The ETUC and EWCs are particularly significant because they pose a challenge to existing arrangements, and potentially enable a re-configuration of the relation between capital and labour at different scales. I conclude that further exploration of European labour geography could re-connect the diversity of forms of organization of production with the scope and potential of trade union strategy; and that thinking in terms of scale is useful because it highlights the significance of both political and relational issues.     

‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re‐appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.     

Welfare Consequences of Green Revolution Technology: Changes in Bangladeshi Food Production and Diet

The Poirier kinked exponential method as used by Boyce (1986) is adopted to examine changes in the Bangladeshi crop sector in the 1947–84 period using aggregate time series data. This is claimed to be a superior approach to earlier ones and it is the first time that non-cereal food crops have been given extensive consideration. Growth rates in output of major crops as well as commodity groups are estimated for various sub-periods with special emphasis on the changes in the period following the Green Revolution. The paper identifies a comparative ‘crowding out’ of non-cereal crop production as well as other food sources, e.g. fisheries, following the Green Revolution. On the whole, increased cereal production has been absorbed by rising population with per capita availability remaining roughly constant. The availability per capita of pulses, fruits and spices has fallen markedly in the post-Green Revolution period and on average per capita availability of vegetables has fallen. Furthermore, per capita protein content (both vegetable and animal) of the Bangladeshi diet has declined. The average Bangladeshi diet now appears to be less varied and balanced and a priori less nutritious with adverse welfare implications. Expansion of rice and wheat production has been at the expense of other sources of food such as pulses, fruit, vegetables and fish.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 1. February 2017

Front and back cover caption, volume 33 issue 1 Front cover COOPERATION & COMPETITION In May 2010, we paid a visit to our friend Aurora';s grandparents in Valea Mic? (Moldova). They greeted us and agreed to pose for this photo at the family house. Aurora presented them with a small gift and we were served sweet bread and pálinka (the traditional homemade spirit based on plums). They spoke with us in Romanian, but they also speak Csango, a Hungarian dialect used by most of the Catholic minority in this part of Moldova. They had lived through dramatic changes: having grown up in a peasant community, they were forced to become ‘agricultural workers’; during the Socialist regime, after which they became peasants again, harvesting part of their former lands. This vignette illustrates how, behind the cultural diversity that can be found in every corner of the world, some basic principles are pervasive: the norms of etiquette to welcome guests accompanied by the exchange of food and gifts. Such token exchanges are a common characteristic of humanity: the tendency to cooperate and initiate and maintain relations through reciprocity. In this issue, J.L. Molina et al. review how different disciplines respond to the question of why humans cooperate. While contributions from sister disciplines tend to explain cooperation as an adaptive response to competition, social anthropology studies cooperation and competition simultaneously through the basic mechanism of reciprocity, or deferred mutual exchanges. This mechanism is present in hunter‐gatherer societies, where generalized reciprocity dominates; in prestige economies, where valuables are exchanged in specific spheres or given away in agonistic institutions; and also in peasant communities, where cooperation and competition coexist but never at the cost of putting at risk the reproduction of the community itself. Back cover ZOMIA Daily scene of agricultural life in the highlands of the Sino‐Vietnamese borderlands. The village, San Sa Ho, is located in Sa Pa District, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam. In May 2010, adults and children – in this case belonging to Hmong Leng ethnicity (Miao‐Yao language family) – transplant rice shoots from nurseries into recently flooded paddy fields. The extended family joins forces for such periods of intensive farming, bartering labour along a balanced reciprocity model involving all levels of economic and ritual life. Rice is the staple crop, supplemented by maize, cassava, and a few vegetables. The limestone geology and rough landscape of western Sa Pa district is unforgiving and farmers have to work extremely hard for modest results. Cash crops are uncommon in this region, even if opium had been a mainstay until the state forbade its production and sale in the early 1990s. This important loss in cash income has hit local farmers very hard and is only partially compensated today by the cultivation and sale of black cardamom, illegal logging, and poachng of wildlife. Vietnam is still under a communist regime but the agrarian transition and the economic turn towards a market economy are now decades old and nearing completion in the crowded lowlands. However, in these remote mountains – which are part of James C. Scott's Zomia – its reach is slowed down by the cultural resistance of egalitarian societies and world views not entirely compatible with the capitalist model. In this issue, Jean Michaud looks at certain limitations in Scott's model.     

Urban concentration and labour market linkages in the Norwegian ICT services sector

Building on research that emphasizes the dependence of services firms on the networks and experiences of individual employees, this paper investigates the urban concentration of information and communication technology services employment in Norway from the perspective of labour market linkages. It finds that urban regions generally provide firms with access to sector-specific expertise. Beyond this, intrinsic region characteristics determine the position of individual firms in national labour markets for expertise: Firms in the dominant university town have strong contact points to academic labour markets, whereas firms in the industrial stronghold of the Western Capital region exploit a broader range of recruitment channels than firms in any of the other urban and non-urban locations. The results illustrate how capability building through recruitment is influenced by local conditions, and imply that the industry will continue to concentrate in the large-city regions where surrounding organizations provide firms with priveliged access to expertise. Implications for research, innovation policy and societal development more generally are drawn.     

Peasant Women and Economic Transformation in The Gambia

Contemporary agricultural development strategies in The Gambia are centred on irrigated rice and vegetables—crops traditionally cultivated by women. Irrigated agriculture, however, is opening up new avenues to capital accumulation at the national, regional and household levels. This article examines the contradictions for women of donor-funded schemes that combine gender equity with productivity objectives. The gender conflicts rife in Gambian irrigation projects point to the significance of female labour for contemporary patterns of agrarian transformation as well as the linkage between women's access to land for independent farming and forms of project participation.     

BRAIN CIRCULATION AND FLEXIBLE ADJUSTMENT: LABOUR MOBILITY AS A CLUSTER ADVANTAGE

This article explores the role of labour mobility as a potential cluster advantage. We review the theoretical arguments as for how and why labour mobility could enhance the dynamism and performance of clusters of similar and related firms. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data from two information and communication technology (ICT) clusters is used to answer two research questions: (1) What is the role of mobility enhancing (or restricting) institutions in clusters? and (2) In what ways does labour mobility contribute to knowledge transfer within clusters? The two ICT clusters studied in the article generally seem to have higher levels of mobility, compared to the labour market at large. Although it is regarded as beneficial in theory, most cluster firms try to restrict mobility of workers since they fear the risk and costs of losing staff. Labour mobility is also rarely viewed as a viable way to increase the knowledge bases or contact networks of firms. However, when firms need to recruit the clustered labour markets seem to benefit them by facilitating the use of informal recruitment processes. By way of conclusion it is suggested that cluster firms might be under‐investing in mobility and that innovative institutional solutions could help realize clusters' mobility potential.     

Multi‐scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights. The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales. This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi‐scalar labour agency within global production networks. This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi‐scalar community‐based labour agency. These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach. The authors find that multi‐scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community‐based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required.     

The Moral Politics of Gendered Labour in Artisanal Mining in Sierra Leone

Drawing on current anthropological approaches to labour, this article examines some of the moral politics mobilized around women and artisanal mining in policy-inflected scholarship with reference to particular gold mining zones in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. In so doing, the article proposes that such a focus on labour not only allows one to appreciate how sentiments concerning (im)proper behaviour infuse wider policy proposals to amend social arrangements in regard to what is called ‘artisanal mining’, but it also offers insight into some of the enduring moral politics helping to constitute women as ‘family workers’ in the actual artisanal gold mining zones. The article suggests that examining the overlapping moral politics constituting women's labour practices provides a more supple understanding of the contested economic possibilities for women in this livelihood practice.     

The Evolution of India's Industrial Labour Share and its Correlates

There has been substantial recent interest in the decline of labour shares across many countries. For the most part, attention has been focused on developed countries. This article examines the evolution of India's labour share in its formal industrial sector from 1983 to 2016. Using two datasets corresponding to sectoral aggregate data and plant-level data respectively, the authors document a secular decline in the labour share across all sectors from 1983, with a stabilization at very low levels (around 8 to 10 per cent) starting around 2007. The plant-level data are used to identify correlates that illuminate reasons for the overall decline in the labour share. The authors find strong evidence to support multiple causes, including increased capital intensity, greater informalization, greater privatization, and productivity increases in larger firms; they therefore suggest that the declines in labour share experienced are due to a composite set of factors. Conversely, other potential explanations (such as regional variation in the labour share) have less explanatory power.     

The changing face of Canada: the uneven geographies of population and social change

This paper attempts to convey a sense of the increasing importance of the population question for the future of Canada and its social geographies. This future will be shaped as much by changes in population processes and living conditions as by economic and political factors. Specifically, four transformations are rippling through the country's social fabric and urban landscapes: slow growth and the demographic transition modifications to family forms and living arrangements; increasing ethnocultural diversity; and the shifting relationships among households, labour markets and the welfare state. There is increasing unevenness of population growth, juxtaposing localized growth and widespread decline, massive social changes, the concentration of immigration and new sources of diversity in metropolitan areas, and fundamental shifts in social attitudes concerning family, work and gender relations. Deepening contrasts in living environments and economic wellbeing flow from these trends, and the varied challenges they pose for private actors, governments and service-providers. Questions relating to the country's future population geographies and social structures are complex, analytically difficult, and politically charged, but are too important to ignore.     

Industrial suburbs and the growth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, 1870–1920

In 1907, the Pittsburgh Survey team recognized that dispersed industrial development had created a metropolitan area stretching 30 to 50 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Traditional interpretations of metropolitan formation fail to account for the crucial role of industry in this process. Beginning in the 1870s, the transformation from small, craft organized factories to integrated mills, mass production, and modern management organization in steel and other industries led many manufacturers to search for large sites with railroad and river accessibility. They purchased land, designed modern plants, and sometimes built towns for workers. Other firms bought into new communities begun as speculative industrial real estate ventures. Some owners removed their plants from the city's labour politics to exert greater control over workers. The region's rugged topography and dispersed natural resources of coal and gas accentuated this dispersal. The rapid growth of steel, glass, railroad equipment and coke industries resulted in both large mass-production plants and numerous smaller firms. As capital deepened and interdependence grew, participants multiplied, economies accrued, the division of labour increased, and localized production systems formed around these industries. Transportation, capital, labour markets, and the division of labour in production bound the scattered industrial plants and communities into a sprawling metropolitan district. By 1910 the Pittsburgh district was a complex urban landscape with a dominant central city, surrounded by proximate residential communities, mill towns, satellite cities, and hundreds of mining towns.     

明代华南的经济作物及其地理分布

经济作物在明代华南农业中占有很大的比重。从宏观上讲,明代华南的经济作物可分为衣料、饮料、油料、果树、蔬菜、木材及其他八类。本文主要论述了棉花、蚕桑、诸麻、甘蔗、茶叶、芝麻、油菜、油桐、乌桕、荔枝、龙眼、槟榔、杉树、诸竹、诸菜、香料、染料和药材的分布及其地域特征。认为明代中期以后,商品经济的发展对经济作物的生产具有较大的剌激作用,而经济作物的增长反过来又在一定程度上推动了商品经济的发展。     

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.     

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti-Trafficking in Nepal

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state’s restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive anti-trafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as “traffickers”.     

Asian Transnational Enterprises and Technology Transfer in Thailand

Like many of its neighbours, Thailand is increasingly interested in upgrading the technological capability of its indigenous firms through the inward investment (foreign direct investment, FDI) of transnational enterprises (TNEs). Its science and technology policies, however, remain fragmented, and they compete with regional distribution priorities. This paper examines the nature of technology transfer between Asian TNEs (Japan and the newly industrializing economies (NIEs), that is, the NIEs of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) and Thai firms based on the responses of some 145 firms from a 2005 survey. It finds only modest levels of technological transfer in production and process technologies. Asian TNEs evaluate factor cost advantages and government incentives favourably. Logistic regressions, however, indicate that government incentives are negatively related to technology process modification between NIE subsidiaries and Thai customers. But, the technical training of Thai workers significantly increases the likelihood of Asian subsidiaries undertaking process technology transfers. Among NIE firms, the ability to import foreign skilled labour further increases the likelihood of such technological activities. Finally, forward linkages among the NIEs are positively associated with firm location in the urban agglomerations of Bangkok and Chon Buri, and, among smaller firms. Our study suggests that prevailing FDI policies have little influence on technology transfer, while technology policies that favour large TNEs work against smaller NIEs that are engaged in modest technology transfer.     

'Managing across borders': knowledge management and expatriation in professional service legal firms

Within professional service firms (PSFs), capital accumulationis dependent upon the embodied knowledge, skills, practice andtrustworthiness of fee-earning staff. In legal PSFs, clientspurchase idiosyncratic knowledge from individuals which aresupplied through close-interaction, co-location and proximity.Legal firms expatriate staff to export English Common Law totheir international offices, but simultaneously, employ theservices of ‘local’ staff to practice local jurisdictionlaw. But, as this analysis of knowledge management and expatriationwithin London-headquartered firms proceeds, the findings indicatethat expatriation is not homogenous for every region of theglobe. In east Asia, expatriation followed a ‘Multinational’typology, characterized by one-way knowledge diffusion fromLondon and a demarcation of labour where expatriates manageoffices, departments and teams. In contrast, expatriation inEurope and North America reflected a ‘Transnational’typology, where knowledge was developed and diffused in a networkof relationships. Here, expatriates worked with locally qualifiedpartners and lawyers, and expatriates of other nationalities,in an environment where locals, expatriates of other nationalitiesand British qualified staff manage, held partnerships and leadteams. In such circumstances, expatriation was a process creating‘transnational communities’ within the firm.