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     

“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.