Unmasking the Essential Realities of COVID-19: The Pasifika Community in the Salt Lake Valley

Pacific Islanders in diaspora are disproportionately contracting COVID-19, experience hospitalization and develop complications. In Utah, Pacific Islanders have the highest contraction rate in the state. Pacific Islanders constitute only 2% of the state's population, but represent 4% of the those infected with COVID-19, begging the question how we might explain the high rates of contraction? As community engaged scholars and practitioners, we offer discussion, insight, and commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic affecting Pacific Islanders in Utah. Grounding this discussion is a history of the Pacific Islander community as an essential workforce that dates back to the 1850s, before statehood. We argue that historical discrimination against these early Pacific Islanders shaped the way this group is racialized as essential laborers today. The authors offer this assertion along with practices and protocols that honour cultural norms of socialization, which we see is the pathway to provide safe measures that are relevant to the Utah Pasifika community.     

Does geographical location matter for ethnic wage gaps?

This paper analyzes ethnic wage gaps in Great Britain by comparing minorities to majority workers in the same local labor market and focuses on the variation of wage gaps across areas. As wage gaps vary across areas, using one single national measure may be misleading. Higher wage gaps across groups are associated with higher occupational segregation and ethnic diversity, while higher wage gaps within groups are associated with higher regional specialization and proportion of co-ethnics. Policies could help by improving job location and selection into occupations across groups.     

跨国公司地方嵌入新视角:基于地方劳工市场的研究进展与理论思考

20世纪90年代以来,跨国公司地方嵌入研究相对聚焦于资本密集型或技术密集型企业,而需要大量非熟练工人的劳动密集型跨国企业并未引起足够关注,建立在产业联系、技术外溢、社会网络等核心概念基础上的跨国公司地方嵌入分析框架很显然不能很好地解释劳动密集型跨国公司地方嵌入的理论与实践问题。在劳工地理学、新经济地理学等学科背景下,基于全球生产网络、关系嵌入、空间修复等核心概念,研究分别从劳工能动性的空间尺度、跨国公司地方嵌入的劳工要素、劳工管控对跨国公司的地方嵌入、区域劳工景观的空间修复等视角出发,系统梳理相关研究进展并提出未来主要研究议题,包括如何识别劳工供需因素对跨国公司地方嵌入的影响机制,如何剖析特殊劳工管控体制下劳工空间实践与能动性的关系,如何刻画跨国公司地方嵌入对区域劳工经济地理景观的影响,如何总结跨国公司地方嵌入与区域发展的战略耦合模式等。     

霸伯治盐与西周井田

西周霸伯铜器铭文显示,位于今山西翼城大河口的霸国伯主不仅有为西周王室治盐之责,而且兼有御戎守护盐池安全的使命。霸伯簋铭文记载了井叔专来霸国辨定盐卤的种类和等级,并命霸伯征伐,提供其美田一百井之井田中央百亩公田所产的两种谷物作为军粮,补其军资。文章结合相关铭文资料讨论了西周井田制和军賦,并就与井田相关的官制官氏等问题提出了看法。     

Divided we fall? The effect of manufacturing decline on the social capital of US communities

What happens to local communities when manufacturing disappears? I examine changes in associational density over nearly two decades as a proxy for social capital in US labor markets. Exploiting plausibly exogenous trade-induced shocks to local manufacturing activity, I test whether deindustrialization is associated with greater or lower organizational membership. I uncover a robust negative relationship between the two variables, particularly acute in rural and mostly-White areas. My findings, however, are sensitive to measurement: There are no clearly discernible effects of deindustrialization on social capital when I consider alternative proxies for the outcome. To reconcile these results, I present evidence suggesting that economic adversity may induce a qualitative, rather than quantitative, change in social capital.     

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda

This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.     

The Implications of Analytic Philosophy of History for the Practicing Historian

An article by John O'Hagan and Elish Kelly in 2005 (see Historical Methods 38:118-25) discussed collecting information on visual artists that would allow a broad historical ranking based on "prominence." O'Hagan and Kelly collected these data to examine prominent artists' birth locations, work locations, and their consequential patterns of labor movement during several long periods. In this article, the authors examine artists' migration for four periods (based on their date of birth): Renaissance Italy, Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the Western world in general for the periods 1850-99 and 1900-49. The data show that important artists clustered in all periods at a remarkably high level. Florence and Rome dominated in Renaissance Italy, with significant clustering because of the artists' birthplaces and domestic migration. Paris and London witnessed a marked clustering of artists born in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Paris continuing to dominate among artists born in the second half of the nineteenth century. Artists born in the first half of the twentieth century clustered in New York City, with all prominent American artists clustering there.     

European Union at the Crossroads: A Framing Comment

In a framing comment embracing the preceding four papers devoted to the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, a prominent American geographer reviews some of the major problems confronting the European continent. The paper, which begins with the author's view of Europe's dilemma in late 2006, covers a number of geographic implications of the May 2004 expansion. Noted are Russia's overland access to Kaliningrad, the addition of ca. 8 million underprivileged Roma (presently the Union's largest minority population), the potentially divisive new boundary with Russia, the future candidate states emerging from the former Yugoslavia, the prospects of Ukraine's possible membership, and the challenge of Turkey's quest for admission to the EU. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F02, F20, P20. 2 figures, 34 references.