西方地理学界关于生产性服务业作用研究述评

生产性服务业是目前西方大部分服务业体系中对国民经济作用最显著的部分,20世纪70年代以来,西方学者关于生产性服务业作用的研究日益增加。总括而言,西方地理学者对生产性服务业作用的研究主要从四个方面进行:生产性服务业对城市与区域整体发展的作用、对地区的制造业发展的作用、对地区其他服务业发展的作用,以及对城市等级序列重构的作用。其中,主要是从产业的内在功能和布局两个角度研究生产性服务业的作用。     

Are You in This Country? How “Local” Social Relations Can Limit the “Globalisation” of Customer Services Supply Chains

Abstract: The relocation of thousands of call centre and back office jobs from the UK to subcontractors in India in the early 2000s led to extensive speculation that the “globalisation” and “jobs flight” of service work was underway. Yet as this article illustrates some call centre customer services do not easily transfer to different local, social and cultural contexts. Call centre operations are embedded in local social relations and taken for granted skills that are difficult to reproduce outside of the locality which has produced them. Nevertheless the spatial dispersal of work can be as much a political process as it is an economic one. This article, which follows the journey of 1000 call centre jobs from the UK to India, illuminates how subcontracting service work “offshore” can facilitate a transformation of the employment relation and an escape from a difficult to discipline labour force.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

Reactions of the Governments of Nigeria and Biafra to the Role of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra War

Abstract

The high incidence of conflict in the world today, and the overwhelming influence of religion on man and his society, have resulted in an increasing engagement of religion in conflict management. However, in spite of its high profile in managing conflict, religion can sometimes form a barrier to conflict resolution. The Nigeria–Biafra war was one of those wars in which religion, as an instrument of conflict management, played a double-edged sword. This paper examines the reaction of the parties to this conflict to the role of the Catholic Church in managing the conflict.

The involvement of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra war has ever remained one of the highly controversial themes of this war. While the role played by the church appeared to be a welcome development on the part of the Biafran Government, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria (FMG) was against the church and its activities, particularly its relief programme in Biafra during the war. From the available evidence, the church’s relief services, just like those of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were carried out on both sides of the war. The difference was on the level of dependence on it, as well as the degree of its exploitation by the two parties. In addition to its high dependence on the Caritas airlift, the Biafran Government, in its war of propaganda hinged on religion, was out to exploit every available opportunity provided by the church’s relief programme in Biafra. It therefore made its overtures of ‘friendship’ to the church in Biafra and beyond as it assumed the status of a ‘maligned child’ of the mother church. To the FMG that was out to crush a rebellion, such manipulation of religion, using the platform of the church’s programme of relief in Biafra was more than a frustration of its war effort. Its anger was thus directed against the church both locally and internationally such that the latter, among other things, could achieve little or nothing in terms of conflict resolution, although the relief programme of the church in general saved the Biafran population from a war in which starvation was obviously an instrument.     

The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

This paper studies an attempt to replicate the Earth’s biosphere in the second half of the twentieth century with the aim of preserving and refashioning the environment as a self‐reproducing ecological system. Ecosystems dynamics framed the planet Earth as a closed system and directed scientific attention to questions of global environmental management. The image of the Earth as a spacecraft and operable in a similar way supported ideas of placing the environment in a laboratory setting. Using the case of Biosphere 2, launched in the Arizona desert in 1983, this paper studies the images of nature and environment contained in this quest to create an ecosystem and human habitat as good as, or superior to nature on Earth (known in this context as Biosphere 1). The second biosphere was designed as ‘a prototype for a space colony’ that would eventually enable its deteriorating predecessor, the Earthly biosphere, to reproduce and allow human settler societies to migrate to other planets. The paper draws on the cultural history of the ship in Western culture and on ships and spaceships as archetypes of autarkic enclosures set apart from nature. It argues that Biosphere 2 as an example of a technologically controlled endosphere advanced an understanding of the environment as a ‘life support system’ that emphasized not completeness but systems integrity, and was based on principles of functionality and replaceability. The paper will explore how notions of biospheric life support shaped demands on the natural and social environments in Biosphere 2 and Biosphere 1.     

The agricultural potentialities of the Transvaal

During the past decade retail warehouses have become an important new element in the retail structure of many towns and cities. This paper outlines the character and geographical pattern of retail warehouse operations in Scotland and discusses some of the planning issues raised by these developments.     

Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese Sovereignty

A team of Hong Kong-based geographers led by a noted specialist provides a comparative overview of Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese sovereignty (respectively, since 1997 and 1999). The authors outline the historical development of both cities, identifying their common legacies as colonial enclaves as well as shared economic experience as autonomous Special Administrative Regions (SARs) under the "one country, two systems" formula devised in Beijing. The paper includes up-to-date statistical information (some through March 2008) on per capita GDP, visitors from Mainland China and from abroad (for both cities), direct investment, employment in financial services, trade and logistics, and tourism (for Hong Kong) as well as revenues from gambling casinos in Macao that are reportedly surpassing those of Las Vegas. Journal of Economic Literature, O16, O18, O20, R11. Classification Numbers: 11 figures, 4 tables, 46 references.     

Market Creation by Leninist Means: The Regulation of Financial Services in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

Within the process of China’s transition from a centrally-administered to a more market-oriented economy, financial services have played a very special role, but in a counter-intuitive way: what looks like Western market economics turns out to be a Leninist regulatory model. Even as international financial service providers and regulatory communities are invited to play a role in the creation of a Chinese market in financial services, the Communist Party has strengthened its control of top personnel, the judiciary and the media. The reform of the central bank and the establishment of technically independent regulatory agencies seemed to have taken China down the path of OECD economies. The model of a very specific post-regulatory state with Chinese characteristics, however, has not fully incorporated the notion of private authority. Such an acceptance would pose a threat to the CCP monopoly on political power. The attempt to use only semi-private organisations to develop financial markets undermines the long-term stability of the political and economic order.     

Managing Munificence

The navy of Athens during the democratic period (ca. 480-322 BCE) was largely financed and managed by wealthy citizens who undertook a public service, or liturgy, to maintain a warship for a year. With reference to a model of decisions made by the citizens eligible to undertake the liturgy, the author argues that the successive reforms to the institution were designed in ways and introduced at times to preserve its potential both to raise revenue and to remain popular. The first and second reforms performed these tasks by increasing the incentives for the citizens most willing to spend their money to undertake the liturgy; the third did so by reducing free riding.