Regional Unemployment and Regional Labor Markets

Abstract

Capitalist economies undergo the continual creation and destruction of jobs, leading to rising and falling levels of unemployment and producing uneven impacts across places, regions, territories, and scales. Economic geographers have advanced a distinctive approach to the study of regional labor markets and regional unemployment, one that sees labor market restructuring as a variegated sociospatial process. Theoretically and methodologically at odds with neoclassical economics, geographical perspectives on the labor market focus on the endemic spatial disequilibrium of the economy, the social structuration of the labor market, and on regional economies as fields structured by power relations. Unemployment, and which workers become unemployed, is therefore the outcome of geographically specific social processes.