ASSESSING THE REGIONAL IMPACT OF GRANTS ON FDI LOCATION: EVIDENCE FROM U.K. REGIONAL POLICY, 1985–2005

ABSTRACT The paper implements a methodology for assessing the regional impact of investment grants on foreign direct investment (FDI) location, taking data for U.K. regional policy over the period 1985–2005. Using a Generalized Methods of Moments estimator it finds that each £25 million of grant changes the regional location of about six inward FDI projects. On average, projects have 150 jobs and each job diverted costs £27,500 (1995 prices). It also finds that the size of the area designated for grants has a positive location effect. The effect is small in relation to the overall scale of FDI, which may explain the weak grant effect found in recent plant‐based location studies.     

Interpreting the expansion of sea fishing in medieval Europe using stable isotope analysis of archaeological cod bones

Archaeological fish bones reveal increases in marine fish utilisation in Northern and Western Europe beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries AD. We use stable isotope signatures from 300 archaeological cod (Gadus morhua) bones to determine whether this sea fishing revolution resulted from increased local fishing or the introduction of preserved fish transported from distant waters such as Arctic Norway, Iceland and/or the Northern Isles of Scotland (Orkney and Shetland). Results from 12 settlements in England and Flanders (Belgium) indicate that catches were initially local. Between the 9th and 12th centuries most bones represented fish from the southern North Sea. Conversely, by the 13th to 14th centuries demand was increasingly met through long distance transport – signalling the onset of the globalisation of commercial fisheries and suggesting that cities such as London quickly outgrew the capacity of local fish supplies.     

Dreaming of a Golden Bengal: Discontinuities of Place and Identity in South Asia

This article analyses five different representations of the homeland category “Bengal”. The region of Bengal was partitioned twice in the twentieth century and imagined in a multitude of forms at different historical moments. The article describes the conditions that allowed different territories and peoples to crystallise as “Bengal” and “the Bengalis”, and investigates why some versions of the Bengali homeland proved durable as others faded away. Rather than asking who is the real Bengali and where is the real Bengal, it investigates how particular identity categories become popularly practised and why particular images of the homeland come to be perceived as true, legitimate and authentic. It concludes that homeland categories are never fixed and finalised, but are rather always in a process of becoming, and are contested, reimagined and redefined as socio-political contexts change.     

An Analysis of Actual and Potential Clustering Structures,Stakeholder Governance Activities and Cross-locality Linkages in the Welsh Aerospace Industry

Commercial aerospace is a key sector in the Welsh economy, engaged in complex overlapping activities from aircraft manufacture (AM), through maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), to research, development and training (RDT). Defining and operationalizing a framework for analysis using both qualitative and quantitative data, this paper examines the actual and potential roles of the relationships in Wales between commercial aerospace firms, industry, government and institutional stakeholders, at both local and non-local levels. Concentrations of manufacturing in North Wales, and MRO in South Wales along with RDT operate as distinct constituent parts of aerospace clusters in neighbouring regions of England and beyond. The results, however, highlight links between the location of AM, MRO and RDT in Wales, emphasizing their (partially) geographically symbiotic relationships. Moreover, there are key inter-linkages that need consideration if the long-term health of Welsh aerospace is to be secured. Simultaneously, all three sub-sectors in Wales exhibit weaknesses which could render them vulnerable to greater external competition, particularly from developing countries. This emphasizes a need to alter the current governance arrangements and utilize different clustering characteristics that currently exist, with government, as a major sponsor of the industry, having a strong (but changing) role to play in encouraging these more balanced industry structures and decision-making processes.     

White socio-spatial epistemology

Recent work by geographers concerned with the enduring presence of racism has called for an interrogation of the privileges and contingencies of whiteness. Central to this project of denaturalizing White Identity has been the disclosure of its co-constitution with a host of social practices. Building on the work of critical theorists in the humanities and social sciences concerned with masculinist and post-colonial epistemologies, this paper outlines a socio-spatial epistemology of whiteness. Whiteness's central tenets are an essentialist and non-relational construction of space and identity that underwrite its claims to be realized independent of an Other. Spatially, this refusal manifests itself in the deployment of discursive categories associated with scales, boundaries and extensivity in ways that reify space into discrete, unrelated parcels. We discuss some of the implications of this non-relational construction of space and identity in the context of residential segregation and spatial mobility. The paper concludes by noting that historically and geographically specific forms of whiteness have drawn upon a common socio-spatial framing and that further study in this field will benefit anti-racist activism by disclosing the workings of racialization in numerous human geographic contexts.     

Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate ‘citizenship’ amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories—to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties—became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert ‘emotional control’ over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.     

Honours for Glasgow staff

Political Geography of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. Edited by Peter Taylor, 245 x 184 mm, xiii + 269 pp, Belhaven, London, 1993, pbk ISBN 1–85293–1973, £12.95.

Environmental Management in the Soviet Union. By Philip R. Pryde, 228 x 153 mm, xiii + 314 pp, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pbk ISBN 0–521–40905–5, £10.95.

Green Development: Environment und Sustainahility in the Third World. By W.M. Adams, 216 X 138 mm, 273 pp, Routledge, London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–415–08050–9, £12.99.

Debt and Development. By Stuart Corbridge, 230 x 153 mm, 231 pp, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, hbk ISBN 0–631179046, £35.00, pbk ISBN 0–631181383, £10.99.

Contemporary Rural Systems in Transition: Vol. 1 Agriculture and Environment, Vol. 2 Economy and Society. Edited by I.R. Bowler, C.R. Bryant and M.D. Nellis, 240 x 160 mm, viii + 277 and xx + 314 pp, Wallingford, CAB International, 1992, hbk, ISBN 0–85198–813‐X (two‐volume set), £70.00.

Controlling Tropical Deforestation. By Alan Grainger, 232 x 152 mm, 310 pp, Earthscan, London, 1993, pbk, ISBN 1–85383–142–5, £14.95.

Deforestation in the Postwar Philippines. By David M. Kummer, 228 x 152 mm, xvii + 178 pp, University of Chicago Press (Geography Research Paper 234), Chicago and London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–226–46169–6, £13.50.

Nineteenth‐Century Cape Breton — A Historical Geography. By Stephen J. Hornsby, 230 x 153 mm, 304 pp, McGill‐Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 1992, hbk, ISBN 0–7735–0889–9, £33.95.

Challenge of the Natural Environment. By B.J. Knapp, S.R.J. Ross, and D. McCrae, 236 x 135 mm, 272 pp, Longman, Harlow, 1989, pbk, ISBN 0–582–35597–4, £9.99.     

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.