Roepke Lecture Research Articles

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—War, Capitalism, and the Making and Unmaking of Economic Geographies

abstractWar is both incredibly destructive and strangely productive. Its impacts depend on how wars are fought (e.g., sieges, mechanized ground wars, drones) and how warriors are equipped. Cities are built, destroyed, and rebuilt under the impetus of war. New industries are created. The kinds of resources required at one time are devalued and replaced by others at a later date. Here I will develop an argument about how and why warfare has been central to capitalism from its very origins to the present day, and how, along the way, whole landscapes, cities, and regional economies have been transformed in the process. I have two goals in making this argument. One is to demonstrate how instrumental warfare—and by extension the ruling classes who wage it—has been in creating the system we call capitalism and, although the ruling classes have changed, maintaining it. We commonly acknowledge that military industries play a major role in constructing and altering an economic landscape. My argument pushes further to propose that war itself played a foundational role in creating our economic system and our economic geography. My second goal is to urge economic geographers to engage more deeply and substantively with history. Economic geography is very (and reasonably) concerned with the present and the near future; history tends to be a backdrop sketched in to set the stage. I hope to show that a deeper understanding of how we got to the present may influence where we set our analytical sights, in order to better understand where we are now and where we are going.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Economic Geography, Manufacturing, and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene

abstractIn a world beset by the problems of climate change and growing socioeconomic inequality, industrial manufacturing has been implicated as a key driver. In this article we take seriously Roepke’s call for geographic research to intervene in obvious problems and ask can manufacturing contribute to different pathways forward? We reflect on how studies have shifted from positioning manufacturing as a matter of fact (with an emphasis on exposing the exploitative operations of capitalist industrial restructuring) to a matter of concern (especially in advanced economies experiencing the apparent loss of manufacturing). Our intervention is to position manufacturing for the Anthropocene as a matter of care. To do this we pull together feminist insights into care as an embodied entanglement of ethical doings and material transformation, and applied insights into the building of just sustainabilities in place. This thinking frames our discussion of four diverse manufacturing enterprises in Australia (two capitalist firms, a cooperative, and a social enterprise). We make the case for economic geography to attend to ethical economic actions that make other worlds possible.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—From Exploitation to Expropriation: Historic Geographies of Racialized Capitalism

abstractFamiliar, exploitation-centered conceptions of capitalism cannot explain its persistent entanglement with racial oppression. In their place, I suggest an expanded conception that also encompasses an ongoing but disavowed moment of expropriation. By thematizing that other ex, I disclose, first, the crucial role played in capital accumulation by unfree and dependent labor, which is expropriated, as opposed to exploited; and second, the equally indispensable role of politically enforced status distinctions between free, exploitable citizen-workers and dependent, expropriable subjects. Treating such political distinctions as constitutive of capitalist society and as correlated with the color line, I demonstrate that the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits. After developing this proposition systematically, I historicize it, distinguishing four regimes of racialized accumulation according to how exploitation and expropriation are distinguished, sited, and intertwined in each. I end by making the case for combined struggles against both exes and against the larger social system that generates their symbiosis.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—The Lives of Others: Body Work, the Production of Difference, and Labor Geographies

abstract In this article I address one of the key aspects of feminist arguments about the economy—that is claims about domestic and caring labor and its necessity for capitalism. I address who undertakes caring labor, in what social relations, and in which spaces in Western economies, where deindustrialization and the rise of service-dominated employment have been associated with a transformation in the nature of work and the composition of the workforce. I review the ways in which this contemporary economic and employment change has been theorized by economic sociologists and economic geographers, in particular by labor geographers—that part of the discipline to which I feel the greatest connection—suggesting that changes in what is often termed reproductive labor have been relatively neglected at the expense of a focus on immaterial, high-status employment in knowledge-based economies. Through a historical example, I then illustrate the production of difference between women workers in caring jobs in the United Kingdom, arguing that closer attention to the intersection of embodied social attributes adds to explanations of continuity and change in the labor market as well as revealing a legacy of discrimination.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Who Needs the Nation-State?

abstract The nation-state has long been under attack from liberal economists and cosmopolitan ethicists alike. But it has proved remarkably resilient and remains the principal locus of governance as well as the primary determinant of personal attachments and identity. The global financial crisis has further underscored its centrality. Against the background of the globalization revolution, the tendency is to view the nation-state as a hindrance to the achievement of desirable economic and social outcomes. Yet it remains indispensable to the achievement of those goals.

(Re)Placing Path Dependence: A Response to the Debate

AbstractMy aim in this contribution is to respond to the three preceding critiques of my Roepke Lecture on ‘Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock‐in to Evolution’. Each critique raises some pertinent and challenging issues: specifically that Marxist regional political economy is a more powerful perspective with which to ‘take history seriously’; that I should have given due recognition to the idea of ‘punctuated evolution’; and that my attempt to revise and extend the concept of path dependence has ontological problems. I welcome these commentaries, as they contribute to the very debate that my Roepke Lecture was intended to initiate. But I argue that these critiques are themselves contestable, and that none of them undermines the main thrust of that lecture. My aim in the latter was to suggest that we need to widen and revise the concept of path dependence if it is to function as a an evolutionary concept, to set it free from the overly restrictive and conservative interpretation (of ‘lock‐in’) that it has all too often been given in economic‐geographic applications. I defend that aim here.RésuméCette contribution répond aux trois critiques présentées précédemment sur ma ‘Roepke Lecture’ intitulée ‘Rethinking regional path dependence: Beyond lock‐in to evolution’. Chacune soulève des questions pertinentes et passionnantes, à savoir: l’économie politique régionale marxiste offre une perspective plus efficace pour ‘prendre l’histoire au sérieux’; j’aurais dû donner une place à la notion d’‘évolution ponctuelle’; ma tentative de réexamen et d’extension du concept de sentier de dépendance présente des problèmes ontologiques. Ces commentaires sont bienvenus car ils nourrissent le débat que cette intervention cherchait à susciter. Toutefois, selon moi, ces critiques sont elles‐mêmes contestables et aucune ne compromet les idées‐forces de mon propos. Le but de celui‐ci était de proposer d’élargir et de corriger le concept de sentier de dépendance pour qu’il puisse opérer en tant que concept évolutionniste et pour qu’il s’affranchisse de l’interprétation conventionnelle et trop restrictive (de ‘blocage’) qui lui a trop souvent été attribuée dans les applications de géographie économique. C’est cet objectif qui est défendu ici.

A Rejoinder: Remembrance of Things Past

The author responds to the article Commentary on Trevor Barnes' 2011 Roepke Lecture in Economic by Allen Scott, which critiqued his own article Noes from the Underground: Why the History of Economic Geography Matters: The Case of Central Place Theory. He addresses Scott's concerns about such topics as the relationship between war and central place theory and the role of theory in economic geography. Particular focus is given to performance theory.

Commentary on Trevor Barnes’s 2011 Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography

The article discusses the history of economic geography, with an emphasis on geographers Walter Christaller and Edward L. Ullman. It critiques the article Notes From the Underground: Why the History of Economic Geography Matters: The Case of Central Place Theory by Trevor J. Barnes. According to the author, Barnes' article does not fully explain the rise of theoretical quantitative geography. The author also critiques the role of theory in geographic scholarship.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Crises, Geographic Disruptions and the Uneven Development of Political Responses

abstractThe current financial crisis may be deeper and more far reaching than earlier ones except the Great Depression, but it fits into an all-too-common pattern of capitalist development experienced over the past 40 years. What can Marxian theory, with its focus on crisis formation and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation, teach us about the nature of capitalist crises, and what can the actual experience of the crisis teach us about Marxian theory? In what ways has the distinctive geographic unfolding of the crisis—all the way from subprime lending in specific locations to disruptions and spatial fixes in patterns of financial, commodity, capital, and labor flows—contributed either to the deepening of the crisis or to its partial resolution? How, finally, can adequate responses to the crisis tendencies of capitalism and the stresses of endless compound growth be articulated in these times?

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution

This article argues that in its “canonical” form, the path dependence model, with its core concept of lock-in, affords a restrictive and narrowly applicable account of regional and local industrial evolution, an account moreover that is tied to problematic underpinnings based on equilibrist thinking. As such, the canonical path dependence model actually stresses continuity rather than change. The article explores recent developments in political science, in which there have been active attempts to rethink the application of path dependence to the evolution of institutions so as to emphasize change rather than continuity. These developments are used to argue for a rethinking of path dependence ideas in economic geography.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Regional Context and Global Trade

abstractHow should we think of the role of regions in relation to the global economy? Theory has surprising gaps when it comes to building a unified vision of these two scales of development. Two contributions to such a vision are proposed in this article. First, the relationship between geographic concentration and the regional economic specialization it underpins and globalization should be theorized as a dynamic process. Standard location and trade theory is not adequate for this task; instead, the dynamic relationship can be captured through growth theory. But capturing this dynamic relationship requires correcting growth theory to separate its local and its global components, which are, respectively, Marshall-Arrow and Romer externalities. Second, the missing element in all theories of geographic concentration and locally specialized development is an element labeled “context” here. A theory of context, in turn, raises important new questions about the dynamic welfare and developmental effects of contemporary processes of fragmenting and relocating production at a global scale.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Venture Capital in the “Periphery”: The New Argonauts, Global Search, and Local Institution Building

abstractThis article examines the growing importance of global, or external, search networks that firms and other actors rely on to locate collaborators who can solve part of a problem they face or require part of a solution they may be able provide. We focus on the creation in emerging economies of venture capital—an institution that is organized to search systematically for, and foster the development of, firms and industries that can, in turn, collaborate in codesign. The article examines the case of Taiwan, where first-generation immigrant professionals from U.S. technology industries have collaborated with their home-country counterparts to develop the context for entrepreneurial development. It refers to the members of these networks as the new Argonauts, an allusion to the ancient Greek Jason and the Argonauts, who searched for the Golden Fleece. We also argue that the most significant contributions of these skilled professionals to their home countries are not direct transfers of technology or knowledge, but participation in external search and domestic institutional reform. The new Argonauts are ideally positioned to search beyond prevailing routines to identify opportunities for complementary “peripheral” participation in the global economy and to work with public officials to adapt and redesign relevant institutions and firms in their native countries. They are, therefore, exemplary protagonists of “self-discovery”—the process by which an enterprise or entrepreneur determines which markets it can serve—and of a microlevel institutional reform that can, diffusing and cascading, ultimately produce wider structural transformations.

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Catastrophic Earthquake Insurance: Patterns of Adoption

In California, earthquake insurance is not mandatory and is relatively expensive. Investment in earthquake insurance is one indicator of individual/ household response to hazards in the urban environment. This paper reports on a series of three surveys of California homeowners undertaken in 1989, 1990, and 1993 in Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino counties. The surveys addressed six hypotheses: rates of insurance subscription have increased; socioeconomc and demographic characteristics distinguish the insured from the uninsured; insurance purchase is systematically related to geophysical risk at the home site; perceived risk is a predictor of insurance purchase; experience with an earthquake increases perceived risk and motivates insurance purchase; and mandatory noncatastrophic insurance increases the propensity to buy nonmandatory catastrophic insurance. The surveys yielded three primary findings. First, the proportion of households subscribing to earthquake insurance increased steadily, from about 5 percent in 1973 to approximately 40 percent in Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties in 1989 and 50 percent in those counties in 1993. Second, the geographic pattern of insurance subscription has consistently been unrelated to relative geophysical risk: those in areas susceptible to high degrees of ground shaking are no more likely to purchase insurance than those in less risky areas. Third, the strongest and most consistent predictor of earthquake insurance purchase is perceived vulnerability: those who perceive that their homes or communities are likely to experience earthquake damage are more likely to purchase earthquake insurance. Future research should involve cross-cultural studies, specifically addressed at questions of the universality of the empirical relationships between personality, demographic-economic status, and insurance purchase, or, more broadly, earthquake-mitigation behavior.

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Global-Local Tensions: Firms and States in the Global Space-Economy

AbstractA key issue facing researchers of economic, political, social, and cultural change is the dialectical tension between globalizing and localizing processes. From an economic geography perspective, a major question concerns the relationship between the globalizing tendencies of many business firms and the prospects for a genuinely local economic development, particularly in light of the organizational and technological changes associated with the alleged transition to a post-Fordist world. This paper addresses a specific aspect of the “global-local nexus” that has not been well developed in the geographic literature: the relationships between transnational corporations and nation-states. Each can be conceptualized as highly embedded interacting networks. Firms and states are locked in competitive struggles. The competitive strategies they employ are both diverse and the outcome of contested power relations, internal and external. Increasingly, too, they involve various forms of collaborative relatio...

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography the Collective Order of Flexible Production Agglomerations: Lessons for Local Economic Development Policy and Strategic Choice

AbstractA significant portion of the modern world economy is constituted as a patchwork of dense industrial agglomerations. The currently shifting structure of production from Fordist to flexible accumulation has intensified this state of affairs. In this paper, I describe changes in the thrust and content of regional policy resulting from these developments. I briefly delineate the inner logic of flexible production agglomerations, and I argue that they are likely to be most successful when they secure for themselves appropriate frameworks of institutional and collective order. Generic tasks for such frameworks are described in terms of five main arenas of social intervention: (1) industrial technology, (2) labor training, (3) business service associations, (4) innovation networks and cooperative manufacturing structures, and (5) local government and land use control. The case of recent public efforts to establish an electric car industry in Los Angeles is discussed as an illustration of the argument. Th...

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Recycling Urban Systems and Metropolitan Areas: A Geographical Agenda for the 1990s and beyond

As we enter the post-recession 1990s, individual metropolitan areas and entire urban systems face daunting problems in adapting to continued global economic restructuring, ethnocultural changes, de...

The Spatial Separatist Theme and the Problem of Representation in Location—Allocation Models

In this paper the approach to service development planning in the ‘Third World’ put forward by Rushton in his 1988 Roepke Lecture is critically examined. The approach is founded on location—allocation modelling methods. It is argued that although technical improvements in these models mean that they can now represent decision situations more realistically, their conceptual structure is such that they frame the problems of service development planning in a limited way. Specific limits are discussed and identified as an expression of the spatial separatist theme. In his approach Rushton proposes important innovations concerning the role of location—allocation models in the planning process, but the radical potential of his suggestions about the way the models may be used is likely to be diminished by the limits to analysis and prescription which follow from the way the models are constructed.

Howard G. Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Comparative Geography of the Global Economy: Cultures, Corporations, and the Nation-State

In the emerging global economy, the key actors are multinational corporations and nation-states. As they interact, there are different outcomes in different world regions because they play their ga...

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Location Theory, Location-Allocation Models, and Service Development Planning in the Third World

The absence of an integrated system of settlements providing services and facilities is often cited as a cause of underdevelopment in rural areas. Location-allocation analysis systems provide an explicit framework for diagnosing service accessibility problems, measuring the efficiency of recent locational decisions and the current levels of settlement efficiency, and generating viable alternatives for action by decision makers. Development objectives are realized only when these models are applied within a broader location theory framework in which the often antagonistic behaviors of the many actors are recognized.

The Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography Urban Restructuring from a Demographic Perspective

"The central argument of this paper is that recent research has overemphasized the notions of urban restructuring and undervalued the role of spatial demographics in understanding urban and [regional] spatial patterns. The paper examines the notions embedded in urban restructuring and suggests that a focus on several elements of demographic processes is an equally important component of understanding urban and [regional] spatial structure. A specific discussion of the Los Angeles region indicates that there is a high level of complexity in social-spatial change. Social-spatial change is not simply explained by reference to an unspecified urban restructuring."