REVIEWS

Explorations in the Anthropology of Religion. Essays in honour of Jan van Baal. Edited by W. E. A. van Beek and J. H. Scherer. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. 1975. Pp. vi + 303. Price: Dfl. 25.00.     

Book reviews

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Australian Academy of Science and Australian Academy of Technological Sciences, Science and Technology for What Purpose: An Australian Perspective. Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1979, EP.385 (price not stated).

Ward Morehouse (ed.), Science, Technology and the Social Order. Institute for World Order, New York, 1979, pp. 150. $US4.95.

Ralph Pettman, State and Class: A Sociology of International Affairs. Croom Helm, London, 1979, pp. 270. £5.50.

F. A. Mediansky (ed.), The Military and Australia's Defence. Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 165. $6.95.

Sir John Crawford and Saburo Okita (eds.), Australia and Japan: Issues in the Economic Relationship. Australia‐Japan Economic Relations Research Project, Canberra, 1979, pp. v + 140. $3.80.

William R. Kintner and John F. Copper, A Matter of Two Chinas: The China‐Taiwan Issue in U.S. Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, 1979, pp.127. U.S. $6.00 (paper).

Bill Brugger (ed.), China: The Impact of the Cultural Revolution. Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1979, pp. 300. $20.00.

Parris H. Chang, Power and Policy in China. Second edition. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978, pp. 331. $14.50 cloth, $7.95 paper.

O. Edmund Clubb, Twentieth Century China. Third Edition. Columbia University Press, New York, 1978, pp. 554. US$25.00 (Cloth), $9.40 (paper).

Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom. University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, Chicago, 1979, pp. 129. $US10.00.

John Ingleson, Road to Exile: The Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1927–1934. Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd. for ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, Singapore, 1979, pp. 254. No price given.

Malcolm Caldwell and Ernst Utrecht, Indonesia: An Alternative History. Alternative Publishing Co‐operative, Sydney, 1979, pp. 208. Cloth $21.95, Paper $9.95.

Heather A. Sutherland,’ The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese ‘Priyayi. Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd. (For the Asian Studies Association of Australia), Singapore, 1979, pp. 182. $18.00 (cloth), $7.95 (paper).

James Davidson, Indo‐China: Signposts in the Storm. Longman Malaysia Sdn. Berhad, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 1979, pp. 260. $13.95.

Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy. George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1979, pp. 197. $9.95.

Bruce Grant, The Boat People: An Age Investigation. Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 217. $3.50.

Shelton Kodikara, Strategic Factors in Interstate Relations in South Asia. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 19, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, 1979, pp. 87. $4.00.     

A theoretical framework for evolutionary economic geography: industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economicdevelopment as an evolutionary branching process of productinnovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunityfor an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing cityor a new city. One can then obtain both firm size and city sizedistributions as two aggregates resulting from a single evolutionaryprocess. Gains from variety at the firm level (economies ofscope) and the urban level (Jacobs externalities) provide thecentral feedback mechanism in economic development generatingstrong path dependencies in the spatial concentration of industriesand the specialization of cities. Gains from size are also expected,yet these are ultimately bounded by increasing wages. The contributionof our framework lies in providing a micro-foundation of economicgeography in terms of the interplay between industrial dynamicsand urban growth. The framework is sufficiently general to investigatesystematically a number of stylized facts in economic geography,while at the same time it is sufficiently flexible to be extendedsuch as to become applicable in more specific micro-contexts.A number of extensions related to the concepts of knowledgespillover and lock-in, are also discussed.     

Complexity thinking and evolutionary economic geography

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionaryeconomic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionaryeconomics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blendsDarwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection,novelty and inheritance) and elements of a behavioural theoryof the firm. Much less attention has been directed to an alternativeconception based on complexity theory, yet in recent years complexitytheory has increasingly been concerned with the general attributesof evolutionary natural and social systems. In this articlewe explore the idea of the economic landscape as a complex adaptivesystem. We identify several key notions of what is being calledthe new ‘complexity economics’, and examine whetherand in what ways these can be used to help inform an evolutionaryperspective for understanding the uneven development and adaptivetransformation of the economic landscape.     

Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions

The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party until the 1980s, but now strongly favour Labour. Production of those biases results from a variety of influences involving the interaction of the geography of party support with that of constituency boundaries. Increasingly, that interaction has favoured Labour: without any explicit manipulation of the constituency map to its own ends, it now benefits substantially from the equivalent of the malapportionment and gerrymandering cartographic abuses typical of the United States, because of its ability to manipulate its vote distribution within the constituency system.