Workers' strategies to secure jobs,their uses of scale,and competing economic moralities: Rethinking the ‘geography of justice’

This paper considers workers' strategies to secure jobs, the justice of these strategies, and the spatial scales which they involve. It is argued that the justice of such strategies is strongly bound up with the scales at which they are enacted: the morality of social relations is intrinsically geographical. The paper discusses strategies within which workers compete individually or collectively for a given geographically-structured supply of jobs, including the use of social oppressions and territorial chauvinism in such competition. It contrasts these strategies with actions which challenge social oppression within employment, and which seek to know, contest and control flows of capital at large spatial scales. These latter strategies present a radical alternative to mutual competition, and embody different notions of economic justice. All of these strategies are analysed for the relations among workers and between workers and capital which they construct, the scales at which these relations are played out, the political ideologies they involve, and the moral notions generated and deployed. It is argued that to understand these different moralities, justice needs to be conceptualised not as rights understood as quasi-property of individuals but rather as a moral aspect of social relations. Accordingly, the ‘geography of justice’ is conceived as the geography of these social relations rather than geographical patterns of (dis)advantage. It is argued that the ‘interests’ of individuals and of collectives are not given objectively by social structure but are constructed through and between different feasible strategies of action; this has implications for the problem which selfishness poses to socialist economic strategies.     

Book Reviews

ROBERT E. CONRAD. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xxvi, 515. $50.00 cloth; $16.50 paper (US). Reviewed by A.J.R. Russell-Wood

STEPHEN KERN. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Pp. 372. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by Frank M. Turner

ESCOTT REID. On Duty: A Canadian at the Making of the United Nations, 1945–1946. Toronto: McClelland &; Stewart, 1983. Pp. xxii, 181. $16.95 (Can.). Reviewed by Robert Bothwell

LESTER LANOLEY. The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900–1934. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1983. Pp. vii-viii, 255. $26.00 (US). Reviewed by Richard D. Challener

RICHARD BOSWORTH. Italy and the Approach of the First World War. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. 174. $22.50 (US). Reviewed by Samuel R. Williamson, Jr.

ROBERT MIRAK. Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Pp. xiv, 384. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by George B. Kooshian, Jr.

LEE FEIGON. Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. 297. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by William Saywell

GHARLES CRUICKSHANK. SOE in the Far East. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 285. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by David Stafford

F.H. HINSLEY et al. British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations. Volume III, Part 1. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xvi, 690. $39.50 (US). Reviewed by Patrick Beesly

RICHARD HOUGH. The Great War at Sea, 1914–1918. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Pp. xviii, 353. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by Jon Tetsuro Sumida

HERMIA OLIVER. The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London. New York: St Martin's Press, 1983. Pp. 176. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by Haia Shpayer-Makov

STEWART A. STEHLIN. Weimar and the Vatican 1919–1933: German-Vatican Diplomatic Relations in the Interwar Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. 490. $50.00 (US). Reviewed by John S. Conway

GEORGE F.G. STANLEY. The War of 1812: Land Operations. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, in collaboration with the Canadian War Museum, National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada, 1983. Pp. 489. $24.95 (Can.); J.C.A. STAGG, Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. 538. $49.00 (US). Reviewed by William Stinchcombe

JACOB TOURY. Die Jüdische Presse im Österreichischen Kaiserreich: Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der Akkulturation 1802–1918. New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1983. Pp. 171. Reviewed by George O. Kent

GOTTFRIED NIEDHART, ed. Der Westen und die Sowjetunion: Einstellungen und Politik gegenüber der UdSSR in Euro pa und in den USA seit 1917. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1983. Pp. 372. DM 48. Reviewed by Gerhard L. Weinberg

DANIEL H. THOMAS. The Guarantee of Belgian Independence and Integrity in European Diplomacy, 1830's–1930's. Kingston, Rhode Island: D.H. Thomas Publishing, 1983. Pp. xv, 789. Reviewed by D. Stevenson

FRED v. CARSTENSEN. American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. vii, 289. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by John P. Mckay

JULIANNA PUSKAS. From Hungary to the United States, 1880–1914. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982; distributed in North America by Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983. Pp. 225. $24.25 (US). Reviewed by Janos M. Bak

ROGER CHICKERING. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1044. Boston: George Allen &; Unwin, 1983. Pp. 365. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by George L. Mosse

PETER KRTCDTE. Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800, translated by V.R. Berghahn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. 191. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Phyllis Deane

JAMES WILLIAM MORLEY, ed. The China Quagmire: Japan's Expansion on the Asian Continent 1933–1941. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Reviewed by Samuel C. Chu

ERIC HOBSBAWM, TERENCE RANGER, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. 320. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Peter Stansky

AVI SHLAIM. The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949: A Study in Crisis Decision-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. xiii, 463. $38.00 (US). Reviewed by Robert A. Divine

JAMES CRACRAFT, ed. The Soviet Union Today: An Interpretative Guide. Chicago: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1983. Pp. ix, 348. $9.95 (US). Reviewed by Lawrence W. Lerner

M.J. TREBILCOCK, J.R.S. PRICHABD, T.J. COURCHENE, J. WHALLEY, eds. Federalism and the Canadian Economic Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. $25.00 (Can.). Reviewed by Eric Kierans

PHILIP S. KHOURY. Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 153. $34.50 (US). Reviewed by James Jankowski

PAUL MOSLEY. The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1963. Cambridge and New York: Gambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. 289. $49.50 (US). Reviewed by Robert O. Collins     

Manipulating the metonymic: the politics of civic identity and the Bristol Cenotaph, 1919–1932

The city of Bristol was one of the last major cities in Great Britain to unveil a civic memorial to commemorate the Great War 1914–1918. After Leicester (1925), Coventry (1927) and Liverpool (1930), Bristol's Cenotaph was unveiled in 1932, 14 years after the Armistice. During that lapse, its location, source of funding, and commemorative function were the focus of widespread disagreement and division in the city. This paper examines the nature of these disputes. The authors suggest that the tensions in locating a war memorial may have their origins in historic enmities between political and religious factions in the city. By examining in detail the source and manifestations of these disputes, the authors offer a detailed exemplar of how memory is shaped and controlled in British urban spaces.     

GUEST EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: NORDIC GEOGRAPHIES OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the sub field 'geographies of children and youth' and outline ongoing research within the subfield in the Nordic countries. It is shown how geography of children and youth is a relatively new subfield in the Nordic countries but is thriving being spearheaded primarily by young researchers. The main fieldwork locations are the Nordic countries and Africa where principally qualitative methodologies are employed in data collection. Thematically a wide range of issues are being researched. Much of the work being carried out fits within the growing interest in examining the connection between ordinary young people's social position and the production of space, including young people's use of public space. The relationship between place and identity is another important focus. Mobility and migration, however, is arguably where Nordic researchers are making the greatest contribution to the literature on the geographies of children and youth. This special issue should be of interest both to geographers outside of the sub-field who are curious to know what is going on within geographies of children and youth, and to those who are already specialists in this area but know little about the research emanating from the Nordic countries.     

'MOVING AROUND': THE SOCIAL AND SPATIAL MOBILITY OF YOUTH IN LUSAKA

Claims have recently been made for a 'mobilities paradigm' which is challenging the relative 'a-mobile' focus of much of the social sciences. The agenda drawn up for this mobilities paradigm is clearly based on Northern trends with little consideration of the South. African populations have always been mobile but little is known about the mobility of urban populations and in particular of the youth, who constitute a large proportion of the population. This paper explores the daily and residential mobility of young people in Lusaka building upon interviews held with low- and middle-income youth. The aim is to contribute to discussions of: how mobility varies by gender and class; the links between spatial mobility and social and economic mobility; the nature of the relationship between patterns of mobility and residential structure; and how examining mobility can illuminate many other aspects of young people's lives. Overall the picture emerging from Lusaka is rather bleak. In a context of spiralling economic decline and rising HIV/AIDS rates, the social mobility of youth is predominantly downwards which is reflected in the residential and daily mobility patterns of the young people. There is a strong link between young people's mobility and their livelihoods, an aspect of mobility that is widespread in the South but largely overlooked by the emerging mobilities paradigm.