Communications, innovation, and territory: the production network of Swift Meat Packing and the creation of a national US market

This study is an historical and theoretical account of how market territory, configured from flows of production and trade, gets reshaped by the innovative behavior of business firms. The research for this study focuses on the production network developed in the late nineteenth century by the American firm of G.F. Swift & Company. The central theme of this case is how businesses reorganize their strategies, routines and structure as transport and communications technology changes, and how the innovations in production networks engineered by firms as part of this reorganization, become territorially embedded and reconfigure the space for economic activity. The production network pioneered by Swift from railroad and telegraph technology, created long-distance production and trade linkages in the economy that widened the boundaries of formerly-localized markets, and established the foundations of a more geographically-extended, nationally-oriented market space. As it widened market boundaries, however, the network of Swift concentrated economic activity in new places. The essay builds a theoretical framework of the route from the ‘communications revolution,’ to the process of innovation in the firm, to the production network, to territorial transformation. This framework reveals how the railroad and telegraph revolution enabled firms in the US to develop innovations in production networks on the basis of vertically-integrated, geographically-dispersed enterprises organized over a national market space. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved     

Social dominance orientation,fear of terrorism and support for counter-terrorism policies

Following September 11 and the subsequent heightened fear of terrorism from more recent events, this study examines the role of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) in explaining individuals’ support for counter-terrorism policies that infringe individual liberties in pursuit of defending community security. Three hypotheses are proposed: (1) that SDO positively predicts support for ‘defensive’ counter-terrorism policies such as the maintenance of strong border protection; (2) that SDO positively predicts fear of terrorism and fear of Islamic extremism; (3) that the relationship between SDO and support for defensive policies is mediated by fear. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1200 Australian adults, with support found for each hypothesis. Counter-terrorism policies commonly encounter trade-offs between community-wide security and individual-level liberties; pursuit of optimal security tends to require infringement of those liberties. This research demonstrates that high SDO citizens will support such policies, particularly as fear increases.     

Learning to love the republic: Jacobin propaganda and the peasantry of the Haute‐Garonne

The political societies, or Jacobin clubs, formed during the first years of the French Revolution undertook as one of their many projects the political and civic education of the peasantry. The political society of Toulouse, the large republican administrative centre of the south‐western department of the Haute‐Garonne, was particularly active in this mission. By 1790, society members had embarked upon a campaign of written propaganda, using both educational tracts and revolutionary almanacs. However, this initial method was of only limited effectiveness, due to the prejudices of urban society members with regard to the peasants, the widespread illiteracy and non‐comprehension of French in the countryside, and the difficulty of distributing written material to isolated villages at the end of the eighteenth century. The Jacobins of Toulouse attempted to conquer these obstacles through the composition of tracts in the local patois, the use of peasant‐oriented newspapers delivered to local, literate intermediaries, and finally, the sending of their own members into the countryside as political missionaries, armed with leaflets and a copy of the constitution. By the time political clubs were made illegal in 1795, the influence of Jacobin sociability had greatly facilitated a precocious political acculturation of rural communities, prefiguring their more complete politicisation during the course of the nineteenth century.     

No need to hear your voice,when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself…’ Discourses on Knowledge and Power in the !Khuiseb Delta on the Namib Coast, 1780–2016 CE

Indigenous pastoralists at Walvis Bay on the Namib Desert coast were drawn into global commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later, they were impoverished and peripheral to colonial settlement, but their resilience and traditional reliance on the endemic !nara melon gave them a unique cultural identity and a way into the informal domestic market. Subaltern and subservient in the past, the Topnaar today are creating a niche in the modern Namibian economy. I present a background historical archaeology and some of the challenges facing the Topnaar through the subjective voices of a number of historical and current stakeholders. There may be parallels between the story of the Topnaar in the Namib and the archaeology of indigenous communities in Australia, the Americas and elsewhere in the world.     

“This is our land”: collective violence,property law,and imagining the geography of Palestine

This study seeks to explain the origins of two types of violence occurring on the Palestinian landscape, the erasure of Palestinian farms and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Such violence has two sources. One source derives from an enduring practice of meaning-making about geographical places that has inspired groups with territorial ambitions to seize control of the landscapes they covet and is referred to by Edward Said as the crafting of “imaginative geographies.” The second source focuses on changes in property rights that follow when groups with territorial ambitions succeed in seizing control of coveted land. It is the imagined geography of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, first framed by Zionists of the late 19^th century and absorbed into the practices of Israeli state-building, and the changes in property rights inscribed into the Palestinian landscape following Zionist and Israeli military conquests in 1948 and 1967, that lie at the core of violence directed against the Palestinian farm and home today. This process of imagination, legal transformation, and violence is part of a longstanding lineage of dispossession that includes the English enclosures and the taking of land from Amerindians on the Anglo-American colonial frontier.