Socio-economic Restructuring Research Articles

The Role of Small Towns in the Local Economy and Some Implications for Development Policy

Over recent years, socio-economic restructuring has tended to undermine the tradition al functions of small rural towns. Empirical evidence also suggests that significant proportion s of economic transactions are carried out through the region al, national an d international economy. Establishing the degree to which a settlement is integrated into its locality provides an indication of its contemporary function s an d potential role in rural development. In this paper, reliable measures of economic linkages are developed, and it is shown that the strength of local integration is a function of the existing economic structure of the town as well as its proximity to metropolitan centres.

Branding Cities

The author traces the emergence over the past 30 years of a new media genre in U.S. cities: the urban lifestyle magazine. With the shift in the primary role of U.S. cities from production sites to consumption spaces after World War II, these magazines facilitated the branding of consumeroriented urban imaginaries. Using New York Magazine, Atlanta Magazine, and Los Angeles Magazine as examples, the author shows how these “branded cities” changed over time, discursively reflecting and contributing to the socioeconomic restructuring of their namesake cities and the formation of a new urban middle-class niche market.

Why novel foods? An industry perspective

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the human appropriation of aboveground net primary production (aHANPP) in Hungary in the years 1961–2005. In this period aboveground HANPP dropped from 67% to 49% of the potential vegetation's NPP. The trajectory was not smooth, but aboveground HANPP fluctuated with changes in factors affecting agricultural production conditions. Both aboveground net primary production (aNPP) of the prevailing vegetation and harvested aNPP increased during the socialist regime, dropped when the system collapsed and has shown considerable fluctuations since. We discuss the development of aboveground HANPP and the Hungarian land use system in the context of socioeconomic changes during three distinct phases: (1) industrialisation of agriculture (1961–1989), (2) regime collapse (1989–1993) and (3) restructuring of a new economy (1993–2005). Within these periods, different driving factors influenced aboveground HANPP and its constituents. In the phase of industrialisation, mechanisation and agrochemical inputs reduced aHANPP while harvested amounts of biomass increased progressively. In the second phase, political and economic circumstances devastated production conditions resulting in a decline of productivity of actual vegetation and a temporary rise in aboveground HANPP. During the last twelve years, industrialisation patterns of agricultural production recovered. The restructuring of inefficient agricultural production systems raised harvest at moderate levels of agricultural inputs, while climatic conditions intimidated high yield and harvest security. The paper discusses the effect of different economic and political regimes and of major socioeconomic restructuring on the development of the land use system, biomass production and aboveground HANPP.

Globalization and socio-economic restructuring in Andalusia. Challenges and possible alternatives

After setting out a general theoretical approach to the intensification of socio-economic dynamics, the tendency towards deterritorialization, attempts at reterritorialization, and other socio-economic restructuring brought about in local or regional territories by globalization, this article focuses on how these processes are affecting Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain. The globalization of the economy of this traditionally agricultural and underdeveloped region over recent decades has gone hand in hand with a remarkable process of modernization and economic growth. In spite of this, Andalusia is still one of the socio-economic backwaters of Europe with a high rate of unemployment and higher levels of poverty in all its eight provinces than the Spanish average. Globalization exacerbated these difficulties, but it has also created new opportunities for the region which now has an autonomous government and has acquired new powers over many areas of its socio-economic life. The article concludes by reflecting on some possible alternatives to current Andalusian policies, and suggesting how they might respond to the challenges of globalization in order to further Andalusia's socio-economic opportunities in the new global context.

Liberalisation, gender, and the land question in sub-Saharan Africa

This paper focuses on land reform initiatives undertaken in a number of African countries since the late 1980s. Current theories of land and debates on gender issues fail to explain the complex processes through which women's access and rights to land have been affected, contested, and negotiated during socio-economic and political restructuring. Drawing on the case studies of Tanzania and Zimbabwe, this paper is a call for policy-makers, researchers, and activists to return to these neglected issues.

Socio-economic re-structuring and employment: the case of minority ethnic groups

Socio-economic re-structuring and employment: the case of minority ethnic groups

Socio-economic re-structuring and employment: the case of minority ethnic groups.

The consequences of major changes in employment, due to the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the service sector, have not been well-documented, nor theorized, in the sociology of ethnic relations, even in recent studies. For example, Blumer's classic argument that economic development adapts to 'race relations', rather than the reverse as predicted by the modernization school, has not been either empirically resolved or conceptually applied to the UK. By adapting data from the Labour Force Survey and the Census, the paper begins to fill this gap with a detailed account of three main minority ethnic groups, and a separate analysis of male and female employment. It is demonstrated that, contrary to assumptions that members of the minority ethnic groups suffered most from de-industrialization, they actually did rather well, and in some cases did better than the majority population. These findings are re-conceptualized as collective social mobility, as part of a review of a number of conceptual frameworks in the light of the data.

Social Conditions and Economic Performance: The Bond Between Social Structure and Regional Growth in Western Europe

This article tries to assess, by resorting to the use of cluster analysis techniques, the relationship between economic growth and social structure at a regional level in western Europe. It is argued that the processes of socio‐economic restructuring and structural change have rendered the traditional factors determining the location of economic activity more mobile. Hence, since regional disparities tend to persist, the connection between growth and the underlying social conditions has become more visible. The empirical results of the analysis show that there is a robust association between economic growth and the local social forces, and that this relationship is not only evident in the so‐called ‘new growth spaces’, as pinpointed by most of the literature on structural change, but in almost any type of region. Moreover, the results reveal that there is no unique social mix associated with low or high growth, and that similar levels of economic growth might be achieved in very different social environments.Utilisant des techniques d’analyse de groupe, cet article essaie d’évaluer la relation entre la croissance économique et la structure sociale à un niveau régional en Europe occidentale. Je soutiens que les processus de restructuration socio‐économique et le changement structurel ont rendu plus mobiles les facteurs traditionnels qui déterminent où les activités économiques sont situées. Le lien entre la croissance et les conditions sociales fondamentales est donc rendu plus apparent puisque les disparités régionales tendent à persister. Les résultats empiriques de l’analyse montrent qu’il y a une forte association entre la croissance économique et les forces sociales locales, et que cette relation n’est pas seulement évidente dans les soi‐disant ‘nouveaux espaces de croissance», comme il est indiqué dans de nombreux écrits sur le changement structurel, mais dans presque tous les types de régions. De plus, les résultats révèlent qu’aucun mélange social n’est associéà un niveau bas ou à un niveau élevé de croissance, et que des niveaux de croissance similaires peuvent être achevés dans des environnements sociaux très différents.

Education and new hegemonic blocs: Doing policy the 'right' way

Discussions of higher education need to be placed within larger processes of socio-economic and cultural restructuring. While higher education does indeed have its own specific histories and its own relatively autonomous dynamics, the entire sphere participates in and is connected in complex ways to social transformations and to struggles over power. The author examines these larger transformations that are changing the very landscape on which higher education - and education in general - sits. He analyzes the formation of a new hegemonic bloc that is pushing education in particular rightward directions. This tense alliance includes various factions - neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, authoritarian populists, and a particular fraction of the upwardly mobile new middle class. The author critically examines the policies that are being proposed and the possibilities of counter-hegemonic action.

Alternative Perspectives in Third World Development: The Case of Malaysia. Edited by Masudul Alam Choudhury, Uzir Abdul Malik, and Mohammad Anuar Adnan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. xvi, 248 pp. $75.00.

List of Tables - List of Figures - Acknowledgement - Foreword - Introduction M.A.Choudhury, U.A.Malik & M.A.Adnan - Malaysia's Economic Performance, An Overview H.Osman-Rani - Macroeconomic Perspectives of the Malaysian Economy Statistical Appendix M.Z.Saleh - Microeconomic Approaches to Socioeconomic Development in the Third World S.Ali & M.A.Adnan - Privatisation as an Instrument for National Policy and Socioeconomic Restructuring U.A.Malik - A Note on the Ethical Role that Money can Play in Development, the Case of Malaysia A-G.Ismail - Trade and Regional Integration in the Global Perspectives for Malaysia M.H.Piei - Political Economy of Development in Malaysia B.N.Ghosh - Perspectives in Economic Growth and Development with an Application to Malaysia M.A.Choudhury - Structural Adjustment within Malaysian Agriculture in Response to Rapid Industrialisation. Technical Appendix: Complementarity and Substitution in Structural Shifts H.M.Alias & M.A.Choudhury - Human Development Through Poverty Alleviation C.Siwar - Instruments of Participatory Enterprise for Grassroots Development M.A.Choudhury - Conclusion M.A.Choudhury, U.A.Malik & M.A.Adnan - Notes and References - Index

Place and the Paradox of Modernity

The concept of place has, over the past decade, been invigorated theoretically by geographers emphasizing the unboundedness, historical dynamism, and multiple identities inherent in places. This work is often characterized as a new way of conceiving place, enabled in part by the rise of postmodern cultural and social theory and the related demise of modernism in academia. Modernism, it has been claimed, devalued place as a relevant vehicle for understanding social change. This paper, however, contends that in fact place has been a particularly significant terrain for representing the experience of modernity, and that the conception of place envisioned in contemporary cultural geography has important humanistic roots in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The paper examines the intersections between this literary tradition of place representation and academic geography, examining the work of Goethe and Hardy, and the fiction of Raymond Williams. These writers articulated a vision of place not as the site of by-gone traditions and knowable communities, but as the landscape of modernity's paradoxes and contradictions. While there have been echoes of this distinctly modern approach to place in cultural geography, it is often obscured by a focus on the oppositional geopolitics of resistance. I argue that the vision of place derived from the literature discussed can serve as a template for examining the contemporary cultural dynamics of socioeconomic transformation and restructuring, and is advocated here as a basis for evaluating the cultural politics of place in terms of the contradiction and paradox—as opposed to a narrower conception of progressive politics—with which people continue to engage the changes swirling around them.

Reconstructing Citizenship, the Re-scaling of the State and the New Authoritarianism: Closing the Belgian Mines

The paper explores the contested re-configuration of the position of the national state as a result of the reworking of the scales of governance. It is argued that the intricate relationship between recent changes in the 'scaling' of the national state and the formation of new and differently 'scaled' institutional forms takes place in and through processes of urban/regional restructuring as part of an effort to 'produce' globally competitive spaces. The rise of 'glocal' forms of governance is paralleled by the formation of new elite coalitions on the one hand and the systematic exclusion or further disempowerment of politically and/or economically already weaker social groups on the other. Such exclusive homogenisation of regional spaces erodes diversity and difference in highly oppressive ways. The glocal 'entrepreneurial' or 'Schumpeterian workfare' state becomes an 'authoritarian' state. This new 'post-Fordist (?)' form of governance is unstable and re-enforces fragmentation and tension in civil society. This, in turn, not only jeopardises the potential success of the restructuring drive, but undermines social cohesion in an already fractured and fragmented regional social fabric. This thesis will be explored and documented through the analysis of the political economy of urban-regional socio-economic restructuring that paralleled the recent closure of Belgium's five remaining coal pits in the north-eastern Province of Limburg.

European economic restructuring: demographic responses and feedbacks.

The relationship between economic restructuring in Europe and various aspects of demographic change, such as demographic aging and fertility decline, is examined. The focus is on changes in the labor market. "Changing employment conditions--the growth of the secondary labour market, the flexibilization of labour demand and increasingly also of supply, growing female labour force participation rates, generally high ethnic minority unemployment--reflect different aspects of the transition from the Fordist to the postFordist regime as well as changing demographic and life-style influences. Together they have deeply transformed the European landscape of employment and unemployment. The specific role of international migration is also analysed and it is seen to have fundamentally altered between the Fordist and postFordist eras. Less clear to interpret are changing internal migration patterns: has counterurbanization stopped in response to restructuring and integration and is a new postFordist population map unfolding? The paper concludes by evaluating the nature of the relationship between economic restructuring and population trends and identifying pointers for future research."

Restructuring and Decentralization in a World City

World cities face the twin challenges of metropolitan socioeconomic restructuring and spatial decentralization. New York's global financial and man- agerial roles, coupled with deindustrialization and corporate relocation, have polarized social areas. Census data from 1970 and 1990 for the New York metro- politan area indicate demographic and employment shifts, social and ethnic divisions, concentration of wealth and poverty, and exurban growth pressures. The evolution of greater New York from a monocentric to a polycentric metropo- lis, divided into semiautonomous and competing realms, suggests a reordering

Socio-economic Structure and Health in London

This paper considers socio-economic restructuring in London's small areas over two decades, in relation to broader changes in labour and housing markets. The relation of changing social structure to wider evidence of changes in inequality is discussed, with particular regard to the impact of socio-economic structure on health and mortality. The scale of the analysis is at ward level using census data for 1971, 1981 and 1991 and mortality data over 1990/92.

Embellishing nature: the case of the salt mountain project of Cardona, Catalonia, Spain

Many of the proposals presented to reverse the decline of old mining and industrial areas in the developed countries affected by processes of socioeconomic restructuring emphasize cultural and environmental dimensions as a key component of future development strategies of these areas. This trend may be placed in the context of transitions towards a ‘post-industrial’ society in which some components of the natural environment may no longer be considered as physical inputs to the production process but rather as resources to be experienced in aesthetic or recreational terms. The article takes the example of Cardona (Catalonia, Spain) to explore the transition outlined above. The town was a leading centre in the production of potassic salt in Spain. In 1990, however, the mine was closed, and labour relocated to other extractive centres in the region or laid off. The main strategy selected for the recovery of Cardona, the so-called ‘Salt Mountain’ project, attempts to take advantage of salt-related resources to promote leisure and tourism activities.

Socio-Economic Restructuring in Resource Communities: Evolving a Comparative Approach

Socio-Economic Restructuring in Resource Communities: Evolving a Comparative Approach

Women in Western Europe: Socioeconomic Restructuring and Crisis in Gender Contracts

Women γν Western Europe.· Socioeconomic Restructuring and Crisis in Gender Contracts Liisa Rantalaiho and Raija Julkunen Western Europe in the Eighties: Restructuring and Long Term Change The 1980s in Western Europe were a period of restructuring with the aim of economic and social modernization. Restructuring attempted to cope with three major challenges: deepening globalization of economic relations and increasing international competition; the impact of new information technologies in all areas of economic life; and the political attacks on and fiscal problems of the welfare state. This transformation, however, took place in a social landscape which has also been changing in a slow but radical way; the social relationship between women and men is being restructured in people's daily lives. As a result of these social changes, populations are aging, the institution of the family is eroding and transforming, individualization is increasing, and women are entering the labor market on a massive scale. Restructuring or structural change has sometimes seemed like an economic force of nature—disseminating new technologies, creating new products and markets, deindustrializing, wreaking large-scale unemployment . But it has also been the major focus of political and economic measures for individual governments, labor market parties, and international organizations. The most prominent program for increasing European competitiveness is the Single-Market program of the European Community (EC), which dominated political discussions in the late 1980s. Our interest here is on the position of women. Western Europe is not one and the same; there are great differences in the economic, social, and cultural conditions of the various countries and these differences will not be eliminated by ongoing integration. The common factor among them is women's secondary position in society. Women's position, however, is part of certain national socioeconomic and cultural models or patterns, which cluster together in more general types. Even if long-term changes have been surprisingly similar across the countries, they may still result in different consequences in different contexts. Gender Contracts Societies have to guarantee their continuity. People produce goods and services for their daily bread and children who will replace their © 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 5 No. 3 (Winter) 12 Journal of Women's History Winter parents in time. Women and men together have the task of keeping life and society going; they reproduce not only human life, but also social and cultural structures, including the societal structure of gender. There has to be some kind of implicit "gender contract" or gender order that is organized and operates on several levels simultaneously: how institutions are organized, how people interact with each other, how symbols and cultural meanings are used, and how individual identities are formed. The concept of gender in this understanding is not something "natural" or given, but a process of producing and reproducing institutions , meanings, and identities. It is on the move, historical and changeable, but it has a systemic character with a certain basic logic. The Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman writes that the gender system has two principles ^—hierarchy and difference. Difference means that woman, female, or feminine should be clearly discernible in ideas and practices from man, male, or masculine. The hierarchic principle rules that in every instance man, male, or masculine should take precedence and be the primary norm.1 In Western industrial societies the gender order revolves around labor market structures. Afamiliar solution historically established was to divide the responsibilities in separate spheres for men and women, men in production and women in reproduction of human life. That was often more an ideology than reality and constructed with clearly class-specific solutions . Other types of gender contracts have functioned for some time already. The prevailing gender order in the Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—entails the individual right of women to paid work and a certain amount of personal economic and social independence in exchange for women's continuing responsibility for human care, both within public services and in the family, and women's acceptance of a subordinate position within the processes of power.2 The social contradiction remains where both production and reproduction are institutionally separated, although they must be combined in individuáis' lives. But there are strong and basic gender...

Socioeconomic Restructuring and Regional Change: Rethinking Growth in the European Community

Scientific literature on the spatial effects of socioeconomic restructuring has tended to highlight three key components in what has been considered to be the emergence of a new territorial model: the significance of subnational units (regions and cities) as the genuine post-Fordist unit of analysis; the growing prominence of service activities in the configuration of new development areas; and, finally, either the randomizing of the location of growth poles or the appearance of the social dimension as a new determinant of growth. Most studies of spatial restructuring have been confined, however, to the theoretical dimension or to case study analyses. There is a lack of large empirical cross-sectional studies on the topic. In this article, I try to discern, using a cross-sectional method, the extent to which a new growth pattern is developing in the European Community (EC) and the influence of previously existing conditions in current territorial changes in wealth levels. I conclude that a flexible production spatial model is not yet the dominant pattern. Many characteristics of the mass production system are still evident in growth trends. Furthermore, this territorial restructuring is by no means a global and homogeneous process, since it implies different transformations in core, intermediate, and lagging areas.

The Struggle over Place: Redeveloping American Can in Southeast Baltimore

This paper attempts to understand the social construction of place through a study of the 'politics of space'. It does so by way of a case study of socio-economic restructuring in a Southeast Baltimore waterfront neighbourhood. Specifically, the paper explores the contradictions and social conflict surrounding the future of American Can Company's redundant site where speculative forces are now intent on exploiting its latent commercial redevelopment potential. The research begins from the basic proposition that although the geographical landscape exits as a material 'thing', it is nonetheless a conflictual social process and must be comprehended as such. I argue that by rendering less opaque the history, social relations, and struggles involved in the transformation of the material landscape, we can begin to grasp place as constituting one 'moment' in the overall dynamics of capitalist space production. On the basis of research findings from Southeast Baltimore, the paper invokes the necessity to reformulate the manner in which the urban landscape is evaluated. This has important implications for the sharpening of critical theoretical understandings of contemporary urban change, and of the dominant role played by the financial sector therein. It also raises vital political questions concerning local democracy and the empowerment of 'place-bound' groups and communities as they struggle against the exclusionary and 'pulverizing' tendencies of the current phase of capitalist urbanization.