Geography Of Work Research Articles

Industrial relations as power, place and time: the case of Queensland coal mining

ABSTRACT How has the coal mining industry been changing as employers and unions organise their power resources to control and remake spaces of working and living? The most obvious likely changes are those driven by climate change policies. These are, however, only the most obvious, albeit fundamental, transformations facing coal mining workforces and unions. In the massive export coalfields of the State of Queensland, which have been central to the Australian politics of climate change, a less discussed phenomenon has been unfolding, a remaking of place and power in industrial relations. Employer-driven changes, namely automation, the geography of work and bargaining processes, and workforce composition, have presented themselves as the immediate threats to local traditions of work and social practice, not climate policy. ‘Power resources approaches’, when spatialised, historicised and entwined with labour process analysis, help to explain the breadth of employer-driven change and the unevenness of union responses.

Entrepreneurship as conditionality: New geographies of work(fare) in mental health services under austerity

This paper investigates work undertaken by clients of voluntary sector mental health services in the context of austerity. While mental health geographers have often interrogated ‘work cures’, little attention has been paid to client work within traditional care-oriented services. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork in a mental health day centre threatened with closure, I demonstrate that client fundraising can become a crucial source of income when marketised services face budget cuts. Clients are incentivised to act as entrepreneurs, developing creative strategies to secure funding. I conceptualise this as a novel form of conditionality, as access to services comes to depend on entrepreneurial activities. Existing theories offer a narrow conception of conditionality, as behavioural standards imposed through rules. Entrepreneurship appears more flexible, autonomous and voluntary than such rule-based conditionalities. Yet in practice clients face the same choice: work or lose access to welfare provision. I argue that entrepreneurship transforms the institutional geographies of services, directing them towards economic productivity. This can undermine longstanding practices of care, leading some clients to withdraw from services. By focussing on client responses to austerity, this paper makes a crucial contribution to geographical research into voluntary sector precarity, which has tended to focus on staff. More broadly, it advances understandings of the institutional geographies which embed the politics and economics of austerity within everyday experiences of care provision.

Bodies at Work

“Home office” has become a reality for many employees. What is normatively at stake in this shift in the geography of work, given the various forms of structural injustice in our societies? Drawing on the normative criteria of employee well-being and protection from harm, autonomy, non-discrimination, environmental impact, and the role of workplaces as spaces of social encounters, I defend two claims: First, decisions about where individuals work need to be proceduralized on a fair basis, giving employees a voice. Second, giving up the workplace requires a broader discussion about alternatives spaces for social integration.

Italian Geographer Massimo Quaini’s Critical Contribution to the Study of Maps

This article proposes to present to an international public of map scholars the work of the Italian geographer Massimo Quaini, active between the 1970s and 2017. Known outside Italy as a radical geographer mainly for his work Geography and Marxism (1982), Quaini has dedicated numerous studies to the history and criticism of the map. The interest in his scientific production concerns firstly his theoretical contribution to map theory, having subjected to an intense criticism the traditional notion of the cartographic device. Theoretical considerations and the study of documents – analysed in every aspect (patrons, authors, languages, etc.) – have intertwined in a scientific work based on two types of sources: the cartography of the Liguria region and the Napoleonic topographers’ activity, studies in which he anticipated the remarkable work of Anne Godwleska.

New spaces of inequality with the rise of remote work: Autonomy, technostress, and life disruption

The proliferation of remote work with the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a new geography of work and new spaces of inequality. While working remotely can be advantageous, remote work experiences have varied substantially. Those who balanced work-from-home with childcare and education required greater life adjustments. Additionally, while some may have found flexibility and autonomy in where and when they work, others experienced technology-related stress. The upshot is that remote work has transformed the spatial dynamics of work and living space in ways that require reexamining geographic conceptualizations of labor inequality. We build on research on remote work in economic geography, organizational science, and urban studies to (re)conceptualize the varieties of experiences with the transition to remote work and the inequalities embodied in those experiences. To investigate these dynamics, we surveyed 1,172 remote workers in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic, examining how remote work has (re)shaped their working lives and lived experiences of the labor market, as measured by autonomy, technostress, and life disruption. The results identify old and new spaces of inequality as manifested in a wide divergence of work experiences and outcomes, especially across race, age/generation, and the number of dependents.

Digital work: where is the urban workplace and why does it matter?

ABSTRACT Digital technologies are involved in altered, and sometimes new, geographies of work in cities. This article uses the example of the office and platform food or grocery delivery in the UK to demonstrate how digital technologies enable flexible workspace arrangements. This flexibility is distinct from some previous geographies in which a fixed workplace was necessary for production. The article shows how such contemporary geography manifests through the seemingly-contradictory spatial tendencies that constitute the practices of digital work in which the location of the workplace is ambiguous: both anywhere and nowhere. While office work extends beyond a physical office building and, thus, can take place anywhere, platform delivery often involves no fixed workplace for workers in urban areas. Considering where the workplace is with digital technologies not only broadens the conventional sphere of labour politics, but also provides a different perspective on the role of work in contemporary capitalist economies.

Geografías del trabajo en la nueva vitivinicultura. El caso de Valle de Uco, Mendoza

La emergencia de la nueva vitivinicultura de exportación en el Valle de Uco a comienzos del presente siglo propició la aparición de un número de estudios que problematizaron la producción de espacio desde la categoría paisaje. No obstante, resulta imprescindible integrar a este análisis la trastienda del trabajo que hace posible tales paisajes, y el impacto sobre la vida cotidiana y las percepciones de los trabajadores. Para ello recurrimos a una aproximación desde la geografía del trabajo, la sociología del trabajo y la sociología rural. Desde un abordaje cualitativo, indagamos en las tensiones entre capital y trabajo subyacentes en el proceso de producción del paisaje. Como resultado destacamos las transformaciones materiales y espaciales en las formas de organización del trabajo que ha supuesto la nueva vitivinicultura y su impacto en la vida cotidiana de los trabajadores que la sustentan.

Feminist economic geography and the future of work

Scholars have recently begun to account for the absence of feminist analyses in the popular and academic discourse surrounding ‘the future of work’. In this article we offer a critical synthesis of emerging research from feminist economic geography to propose a series of questions about the future of work, conceptualized as both an object of intellectual inquiry and an emerging empirical reality. Feminist economic geography emphasizes difference, embodiment, and conceives of workplaces as dynamic, uneven, and untidy spaces, an emphasis which can help recenter discussions about the future of work on workers and their experience of work. Our discussion features a series of analytically rigorous, theoretically informed, and empirically rich conference papers, organized around three critical questions: Who are the subjects of the future of work? What counts as work? And where should we look? We highlight a broad concept of work developed through debates among feminist scholars across disciplinary fields as a key frame for understanding the global economy, including difference, social reproduction, and the spatial division of labor. Feminist economic geographers are pluralizing the subjects, forms, and geographies of work, which may help enhance our understanding of the future of work in economic geography.

LOCALISATION OF THE FOUR ANCIENT SETTLEMENTS IN THE DISTRICT PARORBELIA, MENTIONED BY STRABO (BOOK 7. FR. 36), FOUNDED BY PHILIP II OF MACEDON IN THE 4TH CENTURY BC

: A fragment of the seventh book of Strabo’s work Geography contains too important information about the historical geography of the lands along the valley of the Strymon River. Among other information, reported by Strabo, this ancient author has also provided us with very valuable but extremely concise information about four ancient settlements located in the geographical area named Parorbelia. The four ancient settlements mentioned by Strabo in a series – Kallipolis, Orthopolis, Philippoupolis and Gareskos, located in the middle of the Parorbelia, in a valley that begins from the ancient settlement Eidomene, have provoked a number of scholarly debates. Many modern researchers have tried to search and suggest different possible locations for these four ancient settlements, but so far no reliable and lasting solution has been found on this issue due to the scarce information in the text of Strabo. The only point that all scholars agree is that this text of Strabo implicitly contains information about the colonisation activity of the Macedonian king Philip II around the middle of the 4th century BC, which is clearly suggested by the name of one of these settlements – Philippoupolis. Here, the author found the correct solution that in fact the Parorbelia area covered the lands both north and south of the ancient Mount Orbelos. The most plausible locations of the four ancient settlements mentioned by Strabo along with the ancient Mount Orbelos and the district Parorbelia are precisely found and presented on modern maps.

Social Attachment to Place and Psychic Costs of Geographic Mobility: How Distance from Hometown and Vacation Flexibility Affect Job Performance

Using a natural experiment and field interviews, this paper studies how social attachment to place imposes psychic costs on workers who experience geographic mobility. This is especially salient when workers are assigned to locations far from their hometown, which may subject them to increased psychic costs related to social attachment to their hometown. Based on semi-structured field interviews conducted with early career workers at an Indian technology firm, we propose that a key mechanism, “vacation flexibility”—that is, the flexibility to take vacation and travel back home when it matters the most—is relevant to the relation between distance from hometown and worker performance. By exploiting the Indian technology firm’s policy of randomly assigning entry-level employees to eight widely scattered locations, we are able to address selection concerns and validate that distance from hometown is negatively related to worker performance under conditions of lesser vacation flexibility compared to when the worker has more vacation flexibility. To offer evidence around the key mechanism of interest, we use subsample analyses and micro-data on leave taken by workers during the major Indian festival of Diwali. Our findings inform literatures on geographic mobility and geography of work, social attachment to place, workplace flexibility, hiring, migration, and early career experiences.

‘Becoming’ factory workers: understanding women’s geographies of work through life stories in Tamil Nadu, India

Feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the multiple places of labour and the intersection of social relations that shape women’s geographies of work. Acknowledging feminist research on gender dynamics of globalization of production and household relations in ‘making available’ women’s labour to the global capital, this article foregrounds explanations offered by the women, through their life stories, of their decisions to enter social relations of waged work. These young women worked in an electronics special economic zone in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I argue that for women ‘becoming’ workers is not merely about entering into waged work or a scripted notion of class identity, but a complex process through which women’s labour gets incorporated into the relations of (re)production and their ability to negotiate these relations to gain control over their bodies and labour. Their consciousness of ‘becoming’ workers is deeply embedded in their awareness and experiences of the gendered relations of labour at homes and their desire to change their life circumstances. Focusing on work-life experiences beyond employment relations, this article highlights the everyday ‘micro-scale’ struggles of women as they negotiate household relations of labour where escape and responsibility form part of their survival strategies and politics of work.

Prehistoric ‘Taskscapes’: Representing Gender, Age and the Geography of Work

It is highly conceivable that prehistoric peoples richly narrated and celebrated their lives and relationship with their environment, but, with no written records available and limited artefacts, recent generations have created their own narratives of the lives of these peoples. This article examines visual representations of prehistoric (‘Stone Age’) societies in popular science published in Britain from 1960s to the present. Stereotyping of gender and division of labour, including its spatiality, is an obvious example of the projection of modern societies’ views onto the past and this is evident in the material examined in this study. Specific images often become ‘viral’ as uncritically repeated ‘schema’ (units of cultural transmission) that reinforce stereotypes; for example, the ‘cave woman’ as ‘drudge’, trapped in the domestic sphere. Such stereotypes remain prevalent in popular science books aimed at children as well as adults.

Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean

Series Editors Preface vi List of Abbreviations vii List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgements x 1 Introduction: Power and Difference in Global Production 1 2 Two Stories of Caribbean Development: Garments -as -Globalization and Garments -as-Regional Entrepreneurialism 28 3 From Manufactura to Mentefactura? Gender and Industrial Restructuring in the Dominican Republic 54 4 Embodied Negotiations: Geographies of Work after Trade Zones 85 5 Reworking Coloniality through the Haitian Dominican Border 113 6 Haiti, the Global Factory and the Politics of Reconstruction 141 7 Unsettling Dominant Crisis Narratives of the Caribbean 163 8 Conclusion 181 Bibliography 187 Index 206

Changes in the Geographies of Work and Home—The ERC Workandhome Project

(2015). Changes in the Geographies of Work and Home—The ERC Workandhome Project. Regions Magazine: Vol. 300, No. 1, pp. 6-9.

Labor and the Urban Landscape: Mobility, Risk, and Possibility amongSyrian Delivery Workers inBeirut

AbstractIn this article, I investigate the embodied, class, and political relations ofSyrian delivery workers on motor scooter who forge a livelihood by moving through the space ofBeirut,Lebanon. I develop an argument about how the work lives of these delivery drivers are characterized by various conditions of insecurity. Rushing around the city, these workers face certain bodily risks, as they are physically vulnerable in vehicular traffic, but they encounter still other forms of precarity as an outcome of both their position in the city's migrant labor regime and a fraughtLebanese political climate in which sentiment against theSyrian regime spills over into the mistreatment of ordinarySyrians. At the same time, I consider how delivery drivers understand their jobs to be constituted by certain forms of freedom and opportunity that make their work distinctive from that performed by mostSyrian laborers inBeirut. Drawing inspiration from anthropology's increased attunement to the particular and multiple forms of insecurity that shape labor and life in our contemporary age, the geographies of work I examine here are both urban and transnational, and thereby highlight the stakes involved in experiences of spatial movement at multiple scales.

The geographies of community‐oriented unionism: scales, targets, sites and domains of union renewal in South Africa and beyond

This article takes the increased interest in union renewal and community politics within the geography discipline as its starting point, and argues that the various cases described in the literature should be understood as socio‐spatial responses to a new geography of work. Encouraged by the literature on contentious politics, I provide a conceptualisation of how workers reconfigure political spaces through community orientation. A concrete case of municipal unionism in Cape Town, South Africa is used to explore these geographies along four dimensions: the scalar strategies of trade unions, their targets for direct action, their sites of recruitment and the domain of mobilisation these campaigns and alliances stake out for themselves. It is argued that community‐oriented unionism tends to entail a reorientation of each of these dimensions. Moreover, union strategies correspond to particular challenges faced in times when local labour markets undergo neoliberal restructuring, such as fragmentation of work and rescaling of labour relations.

New Geographies of Work: A Case Study from Sweden

This paper describes and analyses the geography of work, i.e., the spatial patterns in where paid work is done. The geography of work may diverge from the geography of employment when paid work is done at the premises of client organizations, during commuting, on business trips, on external meetings, at home or at other places. The particular patterns in the geography of work depend on a number of factors, possibilities and constraints. The paper takes its point of departure from the debate about how structural economic changes resulting from evolving service industries and the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entail new forms for the organization of paid work. Flexibility, reflexivity, flows and places are key concepts. The paper presents a case study from Stockholm that takes a workplace perspective and looks at knowledge-intensive work in a public sector organization. The empirical study analyses data from interviews, time diaries and a questionnaire. We analyse how the geography of work is the result of negotiations between different parties and in different arenas, and how this spatial pattern is the result of the character of work tasks and accessibility of ICT support. The discussion illustrates a complex picture of the coexistence of spatial fix and spatial flexibility, and how this may cause tensions but also convenient solutions for organizing and conducting paid work.

The New Geography of Work

This article describes the emergence of a prized labor market in sectors that policymakers have designated as the creative industries. Statistics generated about these sectors have been legion. By contrast, there has been precious little attention to the quality of work life with which such livelihoods are associated. The article considers several features of creative work that have a qualitative dimension and recommends a policy-minded approach to each. The second half of the article examines the case for a cross-class coalition of the sort proposed by the anti-precarity movement. Though they occupy opposite ends of the labor market hierarchy, workers in retail and low-end services and the `creative class' temping in high-end knowledge sectors share certain elements of precarious, or nonstandard employment. While these different segments have existential conditions in common, is there any reason to imagine that they interpret or experience them in similar ways? And, even if they do, is there enough commonality to forge a political coalition of interest against the class polarization associated with economic liberalization?

Is Labor Missing The Internet Third Wave?

Employers use networked technology to divide workers and defeat organizing, from electronically linking branch offices in a new globalized production system to facilitating subcontracting that divides work tasks between employees operating often on different continents. This article traces the evolving use of this new technology by labor activists to combat the undermining of union strength and highlights the present challenge for unions in using the Internet to fully mobilize rank-and-file union members. The reality facing labor is that corporations are using technology in more and more intensive ways to not only reorganize the workplace but to actually reorganize the global geography of work. While unions are themselves increasingly using technology in innovative ways, they still need to step up the pace to keep up with technology-driven corporate restructurings.

Corporate Citizenship? Elites, Labor, and the Geographies of Work in Guatemala

In this paper I critically assess the World Bank's adoption of discourses of corporate social responsibility in Latin America. I argue that the turn to private-sector associations as ‘agents of development’ or ‘corporate citizens’ is a logical extension of the neoliberal policy repertoire, allowing capital to position itself as the key actor within the arena of civil society and permitting the World Bank to resolve some of its internal debates around the role of institutions in development more broadly. At the same time, through a case study of the Guatemalan sugar industry, I argue that these initiatives are constructed in differentiated ways that are rooted in particular class trajectories and geographies of production and social reproduction. Looking at these so-called ‘strategic development alliances’ as arising at least in part from specific geographies of work may allow us to see where possibilities exist to push for more inclusive social and political participation.