Firm agency and global production network dynamics

The Global production networks (GPN) framework has been influential in the analysis of globally coordinated economic arrangements. However, research on GPNs tend to focus on a well-established industries and their existing governance structures with a very little attention to the temporality and changes in these networks and their governance structures. Specifically, despite the central role of ‘lead-firms’ in GPNs, the literature lacks a clear depiction of their competitive and evolutionary trajectory. In response, this paper is concerned with (re)opening the ‘black-box’ of firms and showing how lead-firms’ strategies and practices shape the evolutionary dynamics of GPNs. The paper argues that changing lead firm strategies play a crucial role in shaping the evolution of GPNs, reflecting changes in the industrial and/or business and institutional environments. The paper investigates the Danish, multinational energy company, Ørsted, and discusses the importance of accounting for firm dynamic capabilities, i.e. intra-firm practices and extra-firm (evolutionary) dynamic drivers, in analytical frameworks that analyse GPN dynamics and industries. Lead-firm strategies are shaped by firm-specific capabilities, industry-specific competitive dynamics, and institutions. Accordingly, GPNs’ evolutionary process can be understood as an adapting and/or response mechanism by lead-firms to changes in local and international business as well as multi-scalar institutional environments.     

New technological path creation and the role of institutions in different geo-political spaces

This paper analyses the roles of institutions in facilitating or impeding the creation of new technological pathways in different countries. It is argued that the successful invention, innovation and diffusion of new technologies require the co-evolution of relevant institutions. It is argued that informal institutions, through their impact on people’s beliefs, perceptions and consequential behaviour, crucially influence whether formal institutions co-evolve with technological development and changing circumstances. At the same time, the rigidity of the pre-existing formal institutional arrangements impacts on whether agents can stimulate their co-evolution with the introduction of new technologies. These arguments are explored by comparing the creation of new wind power technologies in Britain and Germany since the 1970s.     

Regional agency and constitution of new paths: a study of agency in early formation of new paths on the west coast of Norway

ABSTRACT

This article analyses regional agency in the early phases of new path constitution. We argue that the early stages of new path constitution can be explained by both structural factors and the strong presence of agency. With a specific focus on agency, this article contributes to the literature by providing a study of the role of agency at different stages of path constitution. The study shows that two types of agency operate together. Public policy agency is carried out through a common thrust for policy tools that can enhance the room to manoeuvre together. In addition, strong entrepreneurial agency functions as a locomotive for other firms which are important trigger points, and pushes the process forward. These two forms of agency need to be interrelated to constitute new paths.     

Questions of minority,agency and voice: student protests in India in 2016

This article takes up issues around questions of minority, agency and voice in relation to the student protests sparked off in the capital city of India, Delhi, in 2016, with other student protests reverberating in the background across India on different campuses – in the east, at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and in the south, at Hyderabad University. Focusing on the moment at midnight 2 March 2016 when the student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was released on bail and returned to Jawaharlal Nehru University campus to address a large gathering, the question is formulated here with respect to how the students of India, who are citizens of the country but who were in a minority in relation to the reigning political dispensation, were treated by their own government almost as stateless migrants are by the nation-states that seek to contain them. This moment of protest and agitation, beamed across the country on television and carried in newsprint and on social media is read here through song, metaphor and the notion of the stateless, reflecting on how the postcolonial was reconfigured when agency was snatched back by students repudiating the subaltern categories into which they had been corralled by the state.     

Science,geography, and nation: the global creation of Thumba

Abstract

The origins of the Indian space program are typically traced back to the founding of a rocket launch base in Thumba in the state of Kerala in India in the 1960s. In creating infrastructure at Thumba, Indian scientific elites used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India, particularly cosmic ray studies. They were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era but were inspired by their newly constituted political imaginary of independent India as a place where science, geography, and nation were perfectly mapped on to each other. NASA’s help was crucial in this regard, enabled as a tool in Cold War high politics, as American technocrats sought to steer India towards the West, while India itself was keenly aware of a more proximate phenomenon, Pakistan’s own burgeoning efforts to do the same. Concerned about domestic opprobrium to large Indian investments in space technology, Indian and American actors shielded the Thumba project from critique by installing it under the umbrella of the international order, in this case the United Nations. This internationalism was complemented by a deep and firm belief in the universalism of modern science as a portable instrument, capable of improving the social order anywhere, regardless of political or social context.     

Women and microcredit: alternative readings of subjectivity,agency, and gender change in rural Mexico

Within the last two decades, the growth of microcredit, or the provision of small loans to poor borrowers, has become a key development initiative in the Global South. This is particularly important for questions of gender relationships, as the majority of microcredit recipients worldwide are low-income women. However, most assessments of microcredit and gender emphasize issues of individual empowerment rather than the large-scale political implications of credit provision. In this article, I critique the use of mainstream empowerment models employed in the assessment of microcredit's ability to provoke changes in gender relationships. I argue that these models often fail to describe microcredit's effects on women's lives due to their epistemological framework, which pushes aside questions of geographical and historical specificity in pursuit of a universally empowered microcredit subject. Examining a mainstream empowerment model I used to conduct research in rural Mexico, I highlight these problems and present an alternative analysis of subjectivity, agency, and gender change as a result of microcredit provision.     

Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason

Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregrounding a language of potentiality and becoming, scholars also envision new ways for looking at democracy and justice. In drawing on three contemporary ethnographies, this review traces how anthropologists examine possibilities in diverse cultural and political contexts, including some of its tenets and conjectures.     

Constructing a Culture of Solidarity: London and the British Coalfields in the Long 1970s

This article explores relationships of solidarity constructed between London and the British coalfields from 1968 until the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Foregrounding the development of a culture of solidarity over this period resituates the support movement during the 1984–1985 strike as embedded in longer‐term relationships, which suggests a more equal relationship between coalfield and metropolitan activists than is given by focusing narrowly on the year itself. I argue that a spatially and temporally dynamic sense of the development of these relationships allows us to better grasp the potentially mutual nature of solidarity. Thinking about the construction of this culture of solidarity can contribute significantly to understanding the nature of labour agency. I emphasise the generative nature of solidarity, particularly the ways in which the spatial and social boundaries of the labour movement were challenged through solidarity relationships, allowing in some instances a more diverse conception of working‐class politics.     

Structural power, agency and national liberation: the case of East Timor

The struggle for independence in East Timor, which came to fruition in 1999, illustrates both that agency can be exercised in ways that change social structures and that changing structural relations are necessary for the effective exercise of agency. This paper presents a basic Marxist theoretical framework for analysing structural power, contrasting this with the understanding of structure developed by structurationists. It then examines the Timorese independence struggle at two crucial turning points, showing how differing structural contexts enabled different outcomes at those turning points.     

Undergraduate student perceptions of assessment and feedback practice: fostering agency and dialogue

ABSTRACT

Assessment and feedback practices sit at the heart of education and the student experience. This paper reports on undergraduate perceptions of assessment and feedback in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, UK. Twenty-eight first and second-year students across six focus groups provided comments on their understanding of feedback, their feedback experiences, and what they felt could be improved. It was clear that students desired feedback that would help them improve summative performance, but were unsure of how best to use it and consequently had high expectations that led to dissatisfaction. Particular concern was expressed about marking and feedback consistency, and the inherent variation in practice they experienced. Many comments indicated a lack of student agency, which may reflect the power relations that students find themselves in within their community of practice. Finding ways of fostering agency and improving dialogue over perceptions and expectations are suggested to be important steps in improving assessment and feedback practice, and student satisfaction.     

Identities and agency in religious spheres: a study of British Muslim women's experience

This article examines the ways in which British born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam through study circles, using data drawn from participant observation of, and interviews with, 25 women in two major cities in northern England. I argue that the religious spaces within which the women participate allow them to assert various identities, as well as agency, as they collectively search to comprehend Islam. In particular, I demonstrate that in traversing these religious spheres, women transform them from male dominated sites to spaces wherein feminine, political and cosmopolitan identities are expressed. Scholarship on Islamic feminism in western contexts has focused on visible symbols such as the veil and little attention has been given to the social processes that Muslim women may engage in order to better understand and practise Islam. For the women who formed part of this study, the veil was only one aspect of their religious identity. In examining religious spheres such as the mosque, I argue these are not disembodied sites where only religious rituals are performed, but are created, discursive spaces and social networks that allow women to feel empowered within British society.     

Adaptation,interaction and urgency: a complex evolutionary economic geography approach to leisure

Local and regional governments in western European peripheral areas aim to spur leisure-led regional development. We explore planning for leisure by applying an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach from a complexity perspective. We identify conditions which enable and constrain leisure development and its effects on the region as a whole. This means combining the local level of individual adaptations with the institutional setting and with the regional scale. We examine the Dutch province of Fryslân and explore by means of case study analysis how current leisure development processes can be explained in a complex evolutionary manner. We explore economic novelty as a result of individual adaptations; how such adaptations through interactions create emerging spatial patterns; how these spatial patterns form self-organizing new types of order; and the way this process is dependent on previous paths whilst also creating new pathways. Our findings show that although development is dependent on individual adaptations often stemming from a few actors, for such adaptations to have an effect on the region requires a connectivity between actors and a sense of urgency amongst those actors. Using a complex EEG approach allows us to explain leisure-led regional development as the product of these conditions. This can help planners deal with the complexity and unpredictability of this process, focusing not on a desired end goal as such, but on creating the conditions in which a more autonomous development can take place.     

Children's agency in resettlement: a study of Swedish cultural orientation programs in Kenya and Sudan

The focus of this study is cultural orientation programs (COPs) for refugees being resettled from Kenya and Sudan in Sweden in 2011. This study aims to highlight how, if at all, children's agency was facilitated during the COPs. The programs were video recorded in order to look at the continuous negotiations during the meetings between the Swedish delegation and the children and youth. The concept of thick and thin agency is used in order to understand how sometimes the overall context of the program as a part of the resettlement process thins the agency of the children.     

The limits of control: Technological agency,urban terrain,strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.     

Space-time geography of female live-in child domestic workers in Dhaka,Bangladesh

Live-in child domestic workers in Bangladesh often experience the surveilling power of their employer's gaze as a Foucauldian panopticon, which both disciplines and engages children in forms of self-discipline. I argue that female child domestic workers in particular have a form of ‘thin’ agency whereby they are severely restricted in their abilities to make independent decisions or to act to their own benefit. I ethnographically unpack the concept of thin agency by analyzing material, cultural, spatial and discursive constraints that both employers and female child domestic workers engage in their daily lives.     

Framing,agency and multiple streams– a case study of parks policy in the Northern Territory

ABSTRACT

There is increasing interest in the role of agency in policy processes for creating effective change. In this paper I explore the critical role of policy entrepreneurs in both creating and capitalising on windows of opportunity through creative framing of issues. I combine Kingdon’s multiple streams framework of the policy, problem and politics streams with the three types of social movement framing – diagnostic, prognostic and motivational – to analyse a case study of pragmatic and innovative policymaking in Australian Indigenous policy. I find that pragmatic policy entrepreneurs used framing to actively refine available policy solutions, particularly in response to structural barriers, and played an active role in brokering the problem in ways to make it politically acceptable. This confirms the importance of ideational processes, and the critical role of framing, in creating windows of opportunity for significant reform.     

Beyond the predicted: expanding our understanding of creative agency in international development through practice and policy

This article analyses the framing of creative agency within the field of international development before going on to challenge some of the limitations of that framing. The critique is informed by research undertaken with artist-led initiatives in Central America that reveals the political implications of that framing and, at the same time, points to alternative forms of creative agency at work. The paper highlights the approaches of a number of international development donors whose policies appear able to support more expansive and emancipatory conceptions of agency for artists and artist-led initiatives, and makes a claim for the political importance of such policy platforms, despite some on-going limitations.     

Sisters in cahoots: female agency in the marriage of Beatrice of England and John of Brittany

As the study of queenship and female agency continues to flourish, this article contributes to recent historiography which has increasingly emphasised the importance of family ties in the functioning of the monarchy in the Middle Ages. This was particularly prevalent in thirteenth-century Anglo-French relations, as Henry III of England and Louis IX of France were married to the count of Provence’s two eldest daughters. The sisterly bond between Marguerite and Eleanor was one of the key components of improved relations between the two kingdoms. One of the ways the sisters were able to restore cordiality was through the marriage of Eleanor’s daughter, Beatrice, to the heir to the duchy of Brittany. This marriage demonstrates the many facets of female agency in reinstating and consolidating peace between England, France and Brittany. It also suggests that Beatrice was more than a pawn and played a role in the diplomacy involved in securing her marriage.     

Regional knowledge capabilities,embeddedness of firms and industry organisation: Bioscience megacentres and economic geography

Changes in epistemology in biosciences are generating important spatial effects. The most notable of these is the emergence of a few 'Bioscience Megacentres' for basic and applied bioscience medical and clinical research (molecular, post-genomic, proteomics, etc.), biotechnology research, training in these and related fields, academic entrepreneurship and commercial exploitation by clusters of 'drug discovery' start-up and spin-off companies, along with specialist venture capital and other innovation system support services. Large pharmaceutical firms that used to lead such knowledge generation and exploitation processes are becoming increasingly dependent upon innovative drug solutions produced in such clusters, and megacentres are now the predominant source of such commercial knowledge. 'Big pharma' is seldom at the heart of megacentres such as those the paper will argue are found in about four locations each in the USA and Europe, but remains important for some risk capital ('milestone payments'), marketing, and distribution of drugs discovered. The embedding of these processes also creates major new regional disparities, which some regional governances have recognised, causing them to develop responsibilities for regional science policy and funding to offset spatial biases intrinsic in traditional national (and in the EU, supranational) research funding regimes. Responses follow a variety of models ranging from market-following to both regionalised (decentralising by the centre) and 'regionalist' (ground-up); in each case, the role of megacentres is justified in health terms. But their role in assisting fulfilment of regional economic growth visions is also clearly perceived and pronounced in policy terms.