Requiem or rebirth? Internal labour markets and labour market restructuring in the Kitchener and Sault Ste. Marie regions

Since the 1980s, social scientists and economic geographers have stressed that 'standard' forms of employment and internal labour markets (ILMs) which characterized Fordism have declined and have been displaced by post-Fordist non-standard and contingent employment arrangements. However, some researchers are critical of the assumptions of a universal decline in ILMs and stress that although ILMs have been significantly restructured, they remain an important part of firm employment strategies. On the basis of a postal survey and interviews conducted with ninety firms and institutions in Kitchener-Waterloo and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1995–1996, I assess the role of ILMs. Although shifts towards non-standard arrangements are evident, employers are clearly aware of the need to maintain if not develop ILM structures. Finally, I argue that geographers need to reconceptualize the relationships between ILMs and external labour markets (ELMs) as integrated phenomena. Thus firms do not use contingent or ELMs and ILMs in exclusion to each other but as part of a continuum of strategies leading to increased blurring of the ILM and ELMs.     

The Cradle of Thought: Growth,Learning, Play and Attachment in Neanderthal Children

Childhood is a core stage in development, essential in the acquisition of social, practical and cultural skills. However, this area receives limited attention in archaeological debate, especially in early prehistory. We here consider Neanderthal childhood, exploring the experience of Neanderthal children using biological, cultural and social evidence. We conclude that Neanderthal childhood experience was subtly different from that of their modern human counterparts, orientated around a greater focus on social relationships within their group. Neanderthal children, as reflected in the burial record, may have played a particularly significant role in their society, especially in the domain of symbolic expression. A consideration of childhood informs broader debates surrounding the subtle differences between Neanderthals and modern humans.     

The Moral Politics of Gendered Labour in Artisanal Mining in Sierra Leone

Drawing on current anthropological approaches to labour, this article examines some of the moral politics mobilized around women and artisanal mining in policy-inflected scholarship with reference to particular gold mining zones in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. In so doing, the article proposes that such a focus on labour not only allows one to appreciate how sentiments concerning (im)proper behaviour infuse wider policy proposals to amend social arrangements in regard to what is called ‘artisanal mining’, but it also offers insight into some of the enduring moral politics helping to constitute women as ‘family workers’ in the actual artisanal gold mining zones. The article suggests that examining the overlapping moral politics constituting women's labour practices provides a more supple understanding of the contested economic possibilities for women in this livelihood practice.     

Book reviews

Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 183 pp. $34.95 (paper).

David Beetham and Kevin Boyle, Introducing Democracy: 80 Questions and Answers. Cambridge: Polity Press/UNESCO, 1995. xiv + 135 pp. £10.95 (paper).

Jurgen Habermas (interviewed by Michael Haller), The Past as Future, translated and edited by Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. xxvi + 185 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Jacob Bercovitch (ed.), Resolving International Conflicts: The Theory and Practice of Mediation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996. xiv + 279 pp. $US19.95 (paper).

Georgina Waylen, Gender in Third World Politics. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996. xi + 163 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds), Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy, 2nd edn. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1995. viii + 592 pp. npg.

Stuart Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. vi + 215 pp. npg.

Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), Post‐Communism: Four Perspectives. New York: The Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. vi + 208 pp. npg.

Stelios Stavridis and Christopher Hill (eds), Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy: Western European Reactions to the Falklands Conflict. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. x + 202 pp. £34.95 (cloth), £14.95 (paper).

Ramesh Thakur (ed.), The United Nations at Fifty: Retrospect and Prospect. Dunedin: University of Otago Press and the Peace Research Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 1996. xvii + 334 pp. $34.95 (paper).

Emma Matanle, The UN Security Council: Prospects for Reform. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs Discussion Paper No. 62, 1995. vi + 70 pp. npg.

Ross Garnaut and Peter Drysdale (eds), Asia Pacific Regionalism: Readings in International Economic Relations. Sydney: Harper Educational Publishers, 1994. xviii + 433 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Russell Trood and Deborah McNamara (eds), The Asia‐Australia Survey 1995–96. Melbourne: Macmillan/Centre for the Study of Australia‐Asia Relations, Griffith University, 1995. xiv + 586 pp. $95.00 (cloth), $42.95 (paper).

Jim Rohwer, Asia Rising. London: Nicholas Brealey, 1996. 382 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

David Shambaugh (ed.), Greater China: The Next Superpower? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ix + 310 pp. $44.95 (cloth).

Anne Blair, Lodge in Vietnam: A Patriot Abroad. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. xv + 200 pp. $US25.00 (cloth).

David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xiv + 335 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore. London: Macmillan, 1994. xv + 252 pp. $88.00 (cloth).

John A. Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xvi + 337 pp. npg.

Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: the German South Pacific and the Influence of World War 1. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. xvii + 387 pp. US$35.OO (cloth).

Anthony Milner (ed.), Australia in Asia: Comparing Cultures. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii + 300 pp. $26.95 (paper).

Lachlan Strahan, Australia's China, Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 374 pp. $34.95 (paper), $90.00 (cloth).

Graeme Cheeseman and Robert Bruce (eds), Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers: Australian Defence and Security Thinking after the Cold War. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin/Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1996. ix + 317 pp. $24.95 (paper).

John Spoehr and Ray Broomhill (eds), Altered States: The Impact of Free Market Policies on the Australian States. Adelaide: Centre for Labour Studies, University of Adelaide/Social Justice Research Foundation, 1995. 226 pp. npg (paper).     

A Foot in Each Sphere: Christine Frederick and Early Twentieth-Century Advertising

The American advertiser has taught the American housewife to think constructively of her job.¹
Christine Frederick, 1929
As we enter the twenty-first century, Martha Stewart's web page proclaims her multi-million-dollar company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to be a "leading creator of original'how to'content and related products for homemakers and other consumers."² Over the last 20 years, Stewart's enterprise, which targets primarily women consumers, has grown from a television show to an empire that includes books, magazines, radio broadcasts, a newspaper column, and Martha Stewart product lines sold in retail stores, through catalogs, and over the Internet.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

Labour in 'lean' times: geography, scale and the national trajectories of workplace change

In this paper we argue that far from being surpassed by globalization, the nation-state remains a key space for organized labour. However, labour geographers' focus on patterns of union organization and strategies of 'internationalism' underplays the enduring role of national institutions. Moreover, while labour geographers have recognized the significance of new forms of work organization, such as just in time and lean production, with some exceptions they have not examined how unions both formally and informally determine the trajectory of workplace change. Based on case studies of unions in the Canadian and German auto industries, we stress that the linkage between national and workplace scales remains critical to understanding how unions are responding to the challenges being presented by lean and just in time production. Finally, while there is a re-scaling of bargaining in the automobile industry to the firm or enterprise scale, the outcomes of decentralization depend largely on the national regulatory context.     

“We Simply Have to Do that Stuff for our Survival”: Labour,Firm Innovation and Cluster Governance in the Canadian Automotive Parts Industry

Based on a case study of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union in southern Ontario we argue for a critical reconstruction of both the labour geography and industrial cluster literature. The former stresses the active role of labour in the formation of economic landscapes, but has yet to explore labour's agency in production and how labour institutions shape technological change, firm innovation and industrial policy and strategy. Conversely, much of the industrial cluster and regional innovation systems literature is silent on the role of unions and industrial relations institutions in fostering innovation. We conclude with two main points. First, while some contend that positive union roles in innovation can only stem from partnerships with management and team working, we argue that innovation is more likely to emerge and worker interests are better protected when traditional collective bargaining structures and progressive employment legislation play a central role. Second, positive workplace and cluster level cooperation in the Canadian automotive parts industry are jeopardized by the broader and ongoing macro‐economic restructuring of OEM global production networks due to over‐capacity and intense cost‐cutting pressures reverberating down the supply chain.